Consideration

Be mine a philosophers’ life in the quiet woodland ways, where if I cannot be gay let a passionless peace be my lot. –Alfred Lord Tennyson

One thing I have to work on is to be less annoyed at rude and inconsiderate people. So far it has been extremely difficult for me to tolerate. Netiquette seems not to have ever reached the ears of many. Spammers are bad enough; hackers worse, but we can chalk it up to ‘they are bad people’. But what about our friends who are too lazy to cut and paste, and send things along with FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD? They expose our emails publicly for spammers to harvest. When pointed out to them the response is apt to be, “Oh, I have barely enough time to send them, I haven’t got time to do that, too” or, “I don’t know how to do that”. My response is, “Well learn like the rest of us!” or, “Well, I don’t have time to scroll through your several pages to find out that the message was not worth reading in the first place!”

A second rudeness is from people who have call waiting (callus interruptus as some of my family has labeled it) but don’t bother to find out who is trying to reach them. How hard is it to be courteous (unless it is an emergency call you are on, or you have been waiting for a long time to speak to a service representative) and say “Let me just check to see if this call is important“. To the second caller who says hello and identifies self, it only takes a few seconds to say, “I am on another call; if this is not an emergency I will call you back. Or, if you know the person is hard to reach, you can come back to the first caller and say, “It is important to take this call, may I call you back?”

There are still some people who don’t have phone answering machines. I have been told by one such, “Let them call back”, to which I replied, “How inconsiderate you are of the other’s person’s time! What makes you think they have the time to keep trying you?” Some, who could well afford them, do not have computers. Knowing I am within easy reach of a computer I am phoned and asked, “Is your computer on.” Since they are 'friends', I answer, yes, you know my computer is always on. It is no matter that I might have been in the middle of something else and am being interrupted, the question then is, “Oh would you mind looking up xxxxx? I’m sure it won’t take you long.” That it should take me ANY time is an annoyance. I want to scream, “And you are not the only one in my life who takes up my time because you are lazy!”

My last comment is about people who see my car in the drive, no others, and assume they can just “drop in”. If I am home I am always doing something and often not dressed to ‘receive’. Most people have cell phones today. If they can afford them, they should. Is it too much to ask that they call and ask if it is okay to drop in, thus giving a head’s up so that I can, at least, not be in the bathroom or I can be fully dressed?

Have people who consider themselves to be good, kind, religious and moral people forgotten the Golden Rule? Perhaps, they value their time less than I value my own.
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