When Conscience Bites

Sometimes I really don’t like being a good person.

At work, the servers tend to hang out by the bar in slow moments.  There are three high-top tables where we can sit and take a short break, get a drink of water, etc.  I was sitting there this afternoon, only a little while before going off the clock, caught between running one table’s food and waiting for another to finish eating.  There’s a reason we’re called “waiters”—there’s a lot of sitting around involved in my profession, especially when the restaurant isn’t busy.

Just down the way, one of the bartender’s tables had been seated, and three women were perusing their menus.  I thought nothing of it—my attention was elsewhere, thinking about my tables or maybe my break, I can’t remember.  So I didn’t notice when the women set their menus down, when they started to glance around impatiently, when they probably looked pointedly at me, sitting close by and obviously a server.  The hostess had just buzzed by, asking if the bartender knew she had a table, when the women got up and left the restaurant.  One of them snapped at me as she went out, “Thanks for the great service.”

Now, this was not my fault.  These women were not my responsibility.  I had just come from taking care of my own tables, had hardly been sitting for five minutes.  And yet, when that woman said that to me, the nasty words sank right down into the pit of my stomach and stayed there.  I felt guilty, and I started thinking of all the things that I could’ve done—maybe I should have gotten the women’s drink order, or at least found the errant bartender and told her to cut her cigarette break short.  The thought that these women blame me for their poor experience, that they think I’m lazy or bad at my job, bothers me, and it bothers me that it bothers me.  Why should I care?

Without a strong conscience, I wouldn’t have worried about that woman’s comment at all.  I wouldn’t have had to spend ten minutes rationalizing why she was wrong in her sentiment, and I wouldn’t have spent a further twenty minutes wishing I could explain to her why I hadn’t helped her and her friends.  Thirty good minutes of emotional energy, wasted.  What was the point?

When they teach you in school how good it is to think about others, how impressive it is to have compassion and empathy and conscience, they never tell you how hard it can be.  It would be so much easier for me if I didn’t care what others thought of me, if they were angry or disappointed with me.  But I do care, sometimes too much, and I’m still learning to deal with the disappointment or anger of people who may never learn otherwise of me. 

I don’t want to spend my life regretting silly little things like this.  I want to be a good person, and I want to understand and appreciate the feelings of others, but I hope I always know my own self-worth enough to know when I truly deserve their censure, and in all other cases, to let it slide off me and away.