I got caught holding the door open for my co-workers for
nearly two minutes today. It’s a problem I share with a lot of Midwesterners.
We hold open the doors for people. Usually someone comes along in fairly quick
order to take a shift. Sometimes, however, the system fails. Two minutes isn’t
even close to my record. Once, during undergrad, I got caught holding the door
open at the Student Center. It was sleeting out. I stood there, grinning like
an idiot as I held the door open for a bunch of glorified children who didn’t
trouble themselves to look up from their smart phones to see why the door was
open for them. This lasted a good five minutes. A secretary noticed I was standing there and
rescued me from my peers. She warned me that it was important not to waste
energy being nice to assholes.
It’s a
lesson that I’ve always had trouble implementing. Damn, but does that
conditioning go deep. Just the thought of being brusque with someone to their
face makes me break out in flop sweat. I mean, sure, I can be salty, but that’s
with people I trust. That’s for laughs.
The
problem is when I get caught holding the door open until I catch my death of
cold. The problem is when people take advantage of my niceness to be complete
and utter douche nozzles.
And this
last week has been just chock-a-block full of douche nozzles. Some of the
douchetry seems to come from pure cluelessness, and some have been just
transparent shit weasels.
Example
one: an old church biddy asked my husband (my husband!?!) last Wednesday when I’m due. (Answer: when hell freezes
over. Babies are sleep vampires and germ factories) My darling only one thought
it was a good idea to tell me about this event. It was not.
Example
two: Saturday, some redneck made an Islamophobic comment on one of my father’s
Facebook posts. Reading the comment section is something I typically ignore
because I don’t enjoy tire fires, but this was my father’s space, and
douchebucket was disrespecting that space. I corrected him politely because I
was raised by a Goddamn gentleman. His response was to post something from some
fucking white/Christian supremacist hate website and to belittle my
intelligence.
Naturally,
I took his “arguments” apart with a fair degree of civility. I didn’t want to.
I wanted to point out that arguments coming from first grade educated, cousin-touching
sheep shaggers were inherently invalid. The cousin-touching sheep shagger
rebuttle, while classic, is categorized as “non-productive.”
We’re
not supposed to descend to the other guy’s level because that’s not how you win
arguments. Here’s the thing, though. I don’t think that there’s an argument
that would get through to these guys. The possibility that they could be wrong
doesn’t penetrate. This shitbird will vote for Trump. He will keep making the
world a shittier place until he drops.
What is
nice getting me, then? It seems from my angle that it’s mainly getting me caught
holding the door open for selfish peckerwoods.
Maybe
it’s about time to start letting the door shut in some fucking faces.
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