The slippery slope into jerkdom
“Medium coffee, one cream, please,” I say in the I’m-a-busyguy-let’s-get-this-done tone I often adopt for such occasions.
“You just want one cream?” the young woman behind the counter asks in a soft voice. “What?”
“You just want one cream?” she says, a little louder.
“Uh, yeah …” I respond before the older woman actually slinging the coffee decides to get involved. “A regular usually comes with two creams,” she says, instructively.
“I know what a regular is,” I snap. “I ordered a coffee with one cream.”
They are both silent. The young woman takes my money, the older woman pours my coffee, adds the cream, stirs it, puts on the lid and labels it with a “C.” I get the sense she is resisting the urge to spit in it.
Seated at the tiny table with my coffee and my phone, I review the whole interaction and come to one difficult conclusion: I think I might be a jerk.
And I’m hardly alone. There has been a slow decline in level of civil discourse in my lifetime, a retrenchment from the fundamentals of politeness. In very short order we’ve gone from ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’ to ‘gimme that’ and ‘screw you.’
My parents instilled the basics in me. Dad insisted that I call everyone I met “Mr.” or “Miss” until they gave me permission to do otherwise.
Mom still makes extra effort to be extra nice to people doing jobs that aren’t much fun (like slinging coffee) and encourages me to do the same.
I’ve done the same with my children, of course. The last thing I usually say to them before they leave the house for sleepovers and other adventures is: “Be safe and best behaviour.”
They can fart at the dinner table at home but they better chew with their mouth closed when sitting down with those who aren’t kin.
Another point of emphasis has been that their online behaviour needs to meet the same standards as those we’ve established in the real world. That’s not a position that’s been universally adopted, clearly. The anonymity that the web and social media often provide allows people to do and say things they never, ever would otherwise.
While I’ve managed to avoid devolving into an internet troll, I do wonder if the nature of the world — often nasty, sometimes truly scary — has carried over into my day-to-day life.
If I spend my digital day surrounded by jerks, do I, in some small but very real way, gradually become one?
That’s a very convenient theory, if only because it at least partially absolves me of my crappy behaviour.
The hard truth of it is that the whole interaction in the coffee shop was set up be my attitude going in and my inability to summon even the basic elements of decency in the face of routine (if unnecessary) questions.
I should probably go apologize ... I wonder if I can do it anonymously, online.