Saturday, August 06, 2005

one more week

i used to believe in the general goodness of humanity. i believed that most people were charitable and caring. i had hope for humankind.

compusa ruined that all for me.

at first it wasn't so bad. as customers came in and pulled their nonsense, i'd brush it aside and tell myself that they were the minority. i would convince myself that they were not the norm. every customer who felt like they needed to cry and whine until we bowed down to their needs were the exceptions. every customer who would bitch and moan when we wouldn't accept their brother's friend's cousin's barber's credit card were outside the norm of society. i held on to the goodness i believed humankind had and felt sorry for those few.

day after day after day. a middle-aged mormon father would give me a "f*** you!" a 17 year old boy would yell and swear because we wouldn't return a mouse after 6 months without a receipt or packaging. an old lady would all but slap me because i wouldn't take her check without a driver's license (by the way, god bless you lady for not having one). everyone wanted last weeks sale price on an item even though the sale was over. everyone wants to capitalize on someone's mistake. nobody would blame themselves for breaking something they bought.

day after day after day.

the individual instances didn't really bother me. they gave me something to laugh about. stories to joke about with friends later on. it was the accumulation of these events that began to get to me. at the end of each day, i'd find myself hating humanity. i'd project my experiences of these people to the whole of humanity. eventually i began to see those who were genuinely good as the exception. those with a soul became the minority.

in five business days, this will all be over. no more compusa. no more customer serivce. no more dealing with the selfish and prude ilk of society.

instead, i'll get to feel like i'm doing something i really care about and enjoy. as i've mentioned before, i'll be working for a couple of my professors, helping edit books and put together a companion for the religious studies (and more specifically, mormon studies) program at uvsc. since march when my professor approached me about this, i've been excited to do it. i was scared for a while that i might not be able to do it because of some retarded financial aid issues. a friend of mine however had faith that things would work out, and it did.

hopefully, a renewed sense of the goodness of humanity will return this fall as well.

until then, i've still got five more days of what is becoming to be hell left. knowing that i'm just about gone makes it even harder to stick around.

it doesn't help either when i have a 7:30 meeting tomorrow morning. at least that means, i'll get out much sooner tomorrow afternoon.

5 comments:

  1. Maybe this will lead you to a more Augustinian view of depravity and the nature of man!

    You have to teach a toddler how to tell the truth, not how to lie.

    ReplyDelete
  2. considering i see the notion of depravity as one of the most repulsive of all religious doctrines, i doubt i'll be going in that direction.

    instead i need to realize that society exists of more than just whiney compusa customers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The overwhelming evidence of evil all around us and in our own hearts ought to tell you otherwise. But I know this is part of the Pelagianism that the LDS church inherited.

    ReplyDelete
  4. when you are going around telling people that they are inherantly only capable of doing evil, what do you expect?

    i don't think humanity is either inherantly good or evil. what makes us human is our ability to choose what we will be. i wouldn't have it any other way. though there may be some evolutionary biological predispositions to lean in certain ways, it is still entirely up to us as free creatures to ultimately choose what we will do.

    as far as there being 'evil all around us', i disagree. i don't think evil exists, only acts condemned by us as evil.

    ReplyDelete
  5. wow, you didn't write a post for 2 days.

    ReplyDelete

Please provide a name or consistent pseudonym with your comments and avoid insults or personal attacks against anyone or any group. All anonymous comments will be immediately deleted. Other comments are subject to deletion at my discretion.