A Lesson In Karma

I love my sister Julia. She’s always been so sweet and innocent. There was this one time though, when she was almost two, that she messed up my other sister Allison’s room. I’m sure she didn’t mean to. She just pulled out a lot of toys and didn’t bother to clean up. Now Allison is usually very understanding and thoughtful, but when she walked into her room and saw everything amiss, she jumped to a conclusion. She was only four, so I guess I understand, but she assumed that somebody had messed up her room, and that somebody was me.

Now she rushed to Mom and Dad, who were the model of fair and cautious judgment, and told them that I had purposefully destroyed her room. I was called in and of course denied it. I had done nothing. I explained that it was Julia and how I had seen her playing in Allison’s room earlier. Unfortunately, Allison was so convinced that it had been me that she lied and said she had seen me do it.

Now I had always been such an honest and responsible child, but for some reason my parents took my sister Allison’s word over mine. I was sent to my room for the night, “More for lying than messing up Allison’s room,” they said. I had planned to go play with Orion, my friend from across the street, so this truly broke my poor little six year old heart.

Now not ten minutes into my punishment, I decided to use the bathroom. I didn’t really need to go; I was just trying to escape the prison that my room had become. That’s when I saw Julia, right in front of the bathroom, playing at the top of the stairs in one of those wheeled stroller chairs. With her back turned to me I walked behind her toward the bathroom, and there she went careening down the stairs, her crying somehow like giggles.

I stepped gingerly into the bathroom and silently, slowly closed the door. I waited till I heard a satisfying thump, then I flushed the toilet and calmly washed my hands. As I exited the bathroom I asked surprisingly (And perhaps a bit loudly) “What happened?” Now Allison being the concerned and curious girl she was, came rushing to the top of the stairs the minute she heard the almost gleeful screams of Julia.

My parents, being so responsible and attentive were quick to react and had rushed to the bottom of the stairs just in time to see Julia’s final bounce onto the floor bellow. They looked up to see an attentive Allison, leaning forward peering down at the now bruised and shaken Julia.

Though my parents are typically the most forgiving and patient of people, they saw fit to punish Allison in ways best not described and I eventually went back to my room to carry out my now deserved sentence, glad that I had taught both my sisters a lesson. Allison now knew that lying could have less immediate repercussions and Julia had a firm grip on the basics of gravity. My family has always been so good about helping each other learn new things.

Poetry, Yahoo! Answers Style

The Night Could Use A Stranger

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The Supermarket Food Chain

During my junior year of college most of my friends spent their free time and breaks getting wasted. I spent mine working as a grocery cashier at Price Chopper. I drove home almost every weekends for work. I could have worked at the one in Utica near my school, but Utica kind of scared me. It had so many closed factories, and the only working one manufactured other abandoned factories.* Yep, the abandoned factory market was booming in Utica circa 2005.

Now growing up, I had always believed that people are genuinely thoughtful intelligent beings. My time at Price Chopper of course confirmed this and also showed me a tremendous work ethic in others that I now aspire to. There were however some oddities in people’s behavior that might be worth mentioning.

Perhaps most noticeable were those individuals that purchased several tabloids on a daily basis (Or as I affectionately called them, ‘crazies’). I found it astonishing that a woman knew Jennifer Aniston’s blood type, but not her own. Even more awkward was one fellow who would buy a TV guide program every week. One day I asked him, “So what shows do you enjoy watching?” I was then informed that he didn’t actually have cable, he just liked to know what he was missing.

Another thing that always struck me as odd, was how obsessed married women were with believing that every man who talked to them was hitting on them. This often led to awkward situations when a man in line would try to strike up a conversation with one of these taken ladies. I can’t recall any particular such dialogue, but they usually went something like this:

MAN: “Hi, do you have the time?”
WOMAN: “I’M MARRIED!”
MAN: “Yes, I see the ring. I also notice that you have a watch and was wondering if you could…”
WOMAN: “BACK OFF PERVERT! I HAVE A HUSBAND!”

While working at Price Chopper I found that I had a natural gift for the profession (I can count), and was quickly promoted to font-end-shift-supervisor. What this means is that instead of staying behind a register all day, complaining that the supervisors never did any work and were huge tight-asses, I got to stand around telling the cashiers what to do and yell at them for no good reason. I soon found myself looking forward to work.

After a while though, I found that yelling at the cashiers was much more effort than I was willing to put forth and sought for more effective lazier means of ordering them around. I stopped shouting at my worthless underlings, and began asking them in confidence to do tasks,. I always made sure to say that I needed them to do it because they were one of the few individuals that I could trust to complete the task properly. Soon I was no longer the object of anyone’s anger. All the motivated workers blamed the lazy ones. And all the lazy ones loved me because I never asked them to do extra work.

But I still had to bother asking people to do things, and this greatly cut into my chatter time and loitering plans. It’s then that I realized that while I loathed and was generally disturbed by my thirty plus male coworkers that hit on the teenage girls working there, perhaps there was a lesson to be learned here. After all, when a sweaty man twice your age smiles at you it’s creepy, but if it’s your supervisor and he’s maybe four years older than you, then he’s just being nice.

Though it wasted quite a bit of my allotted day-dreaming time, I began telling jokes to the female cashiers, and pretended to learn their names (name tags are a wonderful thing). Soon I had each young lady thinking that she was indeed my favorite, and that work on the front end would be so much easier if more employees tried harder like them. After a while I soon found that with a quick smile and feigned laughter I could convince the largely female sixteen-year-old work force to volunteer to do difficult tasks without any other provocation. Success!

Then disaster struck. I had made the front end so effective when I supervised that soon the head front-end-shift-supervisor Mark began asking me to take more hours. Whenever someone needed to take a day off, or a shift needed filling, Mark would call me up. “Hey Drew. I know this is kind of last minute, but we really need somebody to supervise this afternoon. Chris called in sick. I don’t know if he’s actually sick. Why can’t people just show up on time like you?”

I of course would take the shift. After all, it’s nice when somebody notices that you’re working hard, even if it does just mean that you end up working harder. Sometimes when there was a slight overlap in supervisor scheduling, Mark would ask me to bring the garbage back to the compactor or empty the bottle machines. He’d say that he couldn’t trust these younger cashiers to not slack-off in the back, and made me feel like out of all the supervisors, I was his favorite. I decided to quit before he started smiling and winking at me.

* No, it didn’t actually make other abandoned factories.

Hi Koo (Haiku)

Faith

“The prevalence of belief in god(s) (both in the past and in the future) has nothing to do with whether god(s) exists or not, and everything to do with how useful the belief in god(s) is both to society and to individuals. This applies to all other beliefs as well, from faith in government, or believing family members, to trust in one’s own experiences.”

The Personal Ads Get More Honest With Age

The Wise Sullen Willow

Humility

“Humility is not letting someone win or pretending not to care when you lose. It is not feigned ignorance or polite dishonesty. Humility is not a trick to gain approval, nor is it an abdication of your pride. Real humility is defending your values and opinions passionately and if presented with facts that prove you wrong, accepting it, admitting it and learning from it. In truth, it is only by valuing your integrity enough to admit your errors that any real pride is found or the admiration of anyone who’s opinion is worth a damn gained.”