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Perceptions #200033
"He Was Hurting"
by Monroe Hawley
He was a big man with a booming voice. He informed the postal clerk and everyone in earshot that it was ridiculous that the letter had been returned marked "No Such Number." He had lived there for twenty-two years and his son for another five and he knew the address was good, Furthermore, he wasn't going to pay extra postage to have the letter delivered.
The clerk quietly protested that the man shouldn't take it out on him since he wasn't the one who made the mistake. It was to no avail... The customer repeated the same thing over and over with a louder crescendo each time. Finally he said, "I've lost three jobs in the last five years, and am working for minimum wage now." The clerk observed that maybe the reason he had lost his job was the attitude he displayed when he protested the error.
The next day I learned that the reason the piece of mail was not delivered was that the customer had in fact mis-addressed it, sending it to l0th Street rather that 18th Street.
There are several lessons in this story. Imagine how ashamed you would feel after making a scene only to discover that you were the one who was wrong. We have all occasionally had red faces when the guilty finger actually pointed at us.
It is easy to observe that the customer would be very hard to live with. "I'd hate to be his wife" is a typical comment. I presume he is the kind of person most of us wouldn't like as a close friend.
Most important, though, was his revealing statement about losing his job. He was obviously hurting terribly. He was simply taking his frustration out on the postal clerk. Was he hurting because he couldn't keep a job, or was it that he couldn't keep a job because he was hurting? I have no idea, hut the story illustrates the importance of trying to understand where a person is coming from before being overly-critical. I don't know if the man had lost his wife, that his children turned out badly, or that he had never been loved in his childhood. Any of these things, and a lot of others, might explain his tirade. No, he wasn't justified in attacking another person as he did, but it demonstrated to me again the importance of trying to understand others.