There are many people in the world who you're better than in some respect. Other people may be slower than you, worse at cooking, or bad at telling stories. Sometimes, I get mad that other people don't live up to a standard I have in mind. I forget that they're probably good at things I'm terrible at-like surfing and chemistry. I've rolled my eyes at people who take a long time to order at Tim Horton's. I've honked at out-of-town drivers. I've whined when I'm on a team with the slow kid. You probably have, too-like many McGill students, I can be nitpicky, competitive, and bossy. And as charming as we are, these traits aren't necessarily positive.
It all started when I was a kid. I went to parent-teacher conferences religiously. I loved to be in the room when the teacher told my parents that I was smart and co-operative-another adult corroborating what I already knew. Before starting third grade, I read the list of my 23 classmates and burst into tears. I lamented to my father that I was "in a class with 21 idiots!"
At third grade parent-teacher conferences, I was surprised to learn that, although I was smart, I was also lazy and had a bad attitude. Obviously, my teacher didn't understand that I was superior to the rest of my class. I cried through dinner and pouted through school the next day. I like to think that those tendencies have dissipated over the intervening years, but they recently flared up.
A few days ago, I was at a post office in Chicago. The post office is a cross-section of humanity, staffed by a specific slice of it. Both tellers were blue-collar women: a Korean immigrant inexplicably named Juanita, and a black woman with a weave just like Andy Warhol's. Neither of them spoke prescriptively proper English. Both wore, in my opinion, too much makeup. I could also smell the customer at the teller window from across the room, and her hair was matted into a single dreadlock that hung down her back like a beaver tail.
As we waited for her to stammer answers to routine questions in broken English, the woman in front of me turned and quietly said, "I always think I hate my job, but then I come to the post office." After a pang of "Sing it, sister," something occurred to me: although 40 hours a week here would be hellish, it's not like no one was trying. Both tellers and customers were doing their best to explain their needs and get them attended to-proper English be damned.
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