Curt or Rude?

I dropped off two watches at the jewelry store today to have them repaired (I thought they just needed batteries) and when I returned, the gentleman who was the owner of the store (he wasn't very gentle) got my watches for me and proceeded to tell me that one of them needed to have the mechanism cleaned at a cost of $70--replacing the battery did not fix it. I expressed to him that it was only a few months old and I was surprised that it would need such extensive work already.

Well, you would have thought that I called him a liar or something. He very curtly slapped his hand on the counter and said, "Well, what do you want me to do!" I was a little taken back by his demeanor and told him I would take it and send it back where I bought it from. He then asked where I had purchased it and I told him in the Virgin Islands--they have a factory where they make watches. Once again, he bristled like I didn't know what I was talking about and I then told him I had lived there for 8 years and had bought a number of watches at that factory.

After I left the store, I thought to myself--maybe he has had a bad day or maybe he thought I was too cheap and would never be a good customer. (I have bought two rings, a pair of earrings and a crystal pendant in the last year from that store, not to mention taken two other pieces to them to do repairs.) I began to think about how we sometimes react to people because we have had a bad day or worse yet, how we judge people that we don't even know.

Are you rude to people because someone has been rude to you? Do you prejudge people and decide how you will treat them based on how you assess them? God tells us we are not to show partiality or be respectors of persons but how difficult it is at times not to do that. This man was having a difficult time or, maybe he is just an ugly person--now I'm judging. How important it is for us, as Christians, to keep our feelings in check and remember we can not judge nor should we be curt and rude--then we become like the world and are not shining our lights.

As he put my watch in a small envelope and handed it to me, with a kind and inducing tone, he invited me to come back if he could ever help me with anything in the future. You know what I thought. If I ever do go back, I'll make sure to get one of his employees and not him as I always have in the past. I'm sure they would be fired if they ever treated any of his customers that way. (Oh, the second watch I had repaired quit working about an hour after I left the store.)

Now, I have to work on my attitude and reactions toward him. I know I must be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had had a bad day, but oh, that can be hard. I will try to "practice what I preach."

Dana Burk