Wednesday, June 26, 2013

You Never Know

Deja Vu post again (thought I had written on this but not finding it).

Ever had those moments where you walk by someone who is on the phone and you catch only like one sentence of their conversation? Yea? Pretty funny sometimes. And you've probably seen those "OH at work today..." posts on Twitter.

Yesterday it happened twice to me, only on the not-so-funny side.

First one I was walking to down the hall to the bathroom and a guy on the phone says, "Hi, I need to schedule a CT scan." Later in the day I passed a guy on his phone outside a side door who says, "it's going to be a big legal matter now."

On top of that, I myself went out to the hallway to call the Sheriff's Department to follow up on a robbery that happened to me a few days prior.

All sucky life things. Big ass sucky.

It's serves as a reminder to me -- to all of us -- that you never know what people are going through on any given day. Maybe they just found out they have a tumor. Maybe they just found out they're getting divorced. Maybe they just had every single piece of sentimental jewelry stolen from them. Who knows.

But man, we need to remember to cut one another some slack. Perhaps your co-worker is slightly grumpy because of a sad/mad/heartbreaking phone call they just had. We are all living life here. Bad stuff happens, happy stuff happens. And for 40 hours a week of it, we are at work when it happens.

I'm going to call it Grace. Let's give each other Grace more often. Give it now before your phone rings.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So true. There even is a scientific term for it and the fact that we tend to to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in others, but not ourselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

pete van bloem said...

Thank you for hitting my reset. My patience was in short supply and I've been too stingy about giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Appreciate your thoughtful recommendations - keep up the good work!