I feel motivated today to write about the way we treat other people.
So many times I’ve gotten up in the morning in a good mood, only to be shot down by someone at work who is itching for a fight. They are looking for a victim because they have pent up anger over their car not start that morning, the kids kept them up that night, or they had fight with their spouse.
One time I simply delivered a package to a boss and the next thing I knew, it was all around the office that I had done something terrible. In her head she assumed I had an ulterior motive for the delivery, when the simple truth was the reception wasn’t at her desk and the UPS guy gave it to me.
Another scenario that happens is when an individual has old stuff that you trigger. For example, I was trying to get to know a new employee and asked if she had any children? I did this because I have a daughter and wanted to see if we had that in common. But she reacted like she was highly insulted. My guess is she had regrets over not having children or her parents had been bugging her for years to have kids?
Then there is the new stuff like passing poor treatment on from one person to the next. I had a good friend who was complaining to me about a lady she’d known for years who over-reacted when she asked her a question that morning. The lady then lectured her and told her to look up the answer herself. My friend was furious. The next thing I knew, about 30 minutes later, my friend pulled the same thing on me.
And finally, similar to the above problem in asking a question, I’d been having an issue with my blog not showing up in the Reader feature so I wrote WordPress on a Support Forum for an answer. I posted the question a few times over the span of a several weeks waiting for an answer. I finally received a reply from a WordPress staff person today lecturing me for posting so many times, reblogging, and asking a question that had been answered months ago.
I wrote back that I posted so many times because I didn’t receive a reply, I reblogged months ago because I had been seriously ill and was trying to keep the site up and recently reblogged because I was testing fixes to the Reader problem, and that the previous issue was different. So you see, sometimes we make negative assumptions about situations and give snappy answers to people, when it’s just are not true.
LIFE INSTRUCTION NO. 3: Don’t take your stuff out on other people. Be kind to each other. Be aware that at times we all lay negative filters (filled with our pent-up feelings) over perfectly innocent situations and pounce on unsuspecting victims. Stop that!
Life with Instructions 