Some people have a way of ruining your whole day just by opening their mouths. I call these people rude. Well, the truth is that I call these people all kinds of things, none of which I can mention in this article.
Rude people just have that special knack of saying one thing that makes you angry all day. Once they've angered you by uttering words from their mouths, you are never quite the same again. You are filled with a fury that can only be satisfied when you have their heads on a platter. You spend the rest of the day thinking how the bwoy (or female equivalent) had the audacity to say what he did. And the more you go over it in your mind, the more you decide that you should have given him a piece of your mind. Even more you wonder why you didn't let him or her have some choice Jamaican words.
Yes, once you've crossed the path of a rude person early on, it's all downhill from there. Some kinds of rude people are tolerable because when they talk you simply zone them out. You completely ignore what they have to say since it's obvious that they don't know better and it's obvious that they've never been taught manners. They're not worth bothering with.
The second type of rude people are the worst. They are the ones who work for you. By that I mean, the people whose wages you pay, directly or indirectly. They come in all shapes, colours and sizes.
They are rude business people, rude waitresses, rude cashiers and rude taxi drivers. They're the type of rude people who ought to know better because they ought to know that if you decide to boycott them because of their rudeness (and everyone else did likewise) they might die of hunger. Frankly, they should treat you like the 'be-all and end-all' since you pay their wages.
Many of these people are under the false impression, however, that you [the customer] should be grateful that they even bother to grace you with their presence, let alone, speak to you. These people are dangerous people because they have managed to convince themselves of a fallacy. They have created an alternate reality.
They demand that you do things the way that they think you should. It doesn't matter to them that the customer is always right. No, that's just an old maxim that old people long ago in the Middle Ages had. These modern-day, liberalists will tell you 'sometimes the customer is wrong.'
An especially annoying example of this kind of rude people is the cashier who expresses extreme annoyance at the fact that you didn't order what you wanted the first time around. Obviously they have better things to do than to work for their pay. Clearly, you ought to go elsewhere where people actually work for their pay.
Sometimes in attempting to deal with one rude person you come into contact with another set of rude people. These rude people are sometimes called "customer service representatives." Some of them couldn't lie to save their lives because it's evident from the false smile pasted on their faces and from the irksome quality of their voice that they really couldn't care less about what you have to say.
Customer service representatives are among the most abominable type of rude people. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure good customer service representatives exist. I just haven't met any.
Trust me, the really rude and really "Jamaican" rude people are a terror. The thing that these rude people do not recognise is that you are really just like them, the rudeness and all aside. They just don't realise that when they come across people as rude as they are, they react as irrationally and uncontrollably as you do.
Fact is, they are just like you and perhaps in a way they are you. If they realise this and really understand the meaning of "do unto others as you would have done unto you," we'd all get along fine.
Archibald Gordon
Email me at skilarchie@usa.net
