Just Stop Being Complainy, Please
Last week the original battery in my Subaru Outback finally died. It lasted a whopping 8.5 years which is amazing. I of course drive way less than the average American and only have 51k miles on an almost nine year old vehicle, so that helps and saves me beaucoup bucks across the board.
I used a portable boost device (<– affiliate link, yes I have it and it works great) to jump start her to life and went to the mega-chain auto parts store to get a new one. This store is in a seedier part of town as many auto parts stores are. It was crowded. I noticed the woman behind the counter (Wanda) was very stressed. She couldn’t find an item in the back for another customer that the computer said they should have. The customer was getting angry.
I waited in line a good while, the whole time observing the woman who seemingly had no help and was doing her best to do her really shitty job. When it was finally my turn I told her I needed a battery for a ’14 Outback and she looked a bit relieved, as if thinking “phew, this one should be easy”.
She called me ‘sweetie’ in a folksy way. I’m from Baltimore, I like that. She also informed me that the store offers free install and a $20 refund for recycling the old battery. I hadn’t bought a car battery in over 15 years and didn’t expect the free install. Bonus! Changing a battery is thankfully one of the few things you can still do yourself easily in most cars, but if they’re gonna do it here for me free then that’s a bonus.
Oh Well
She brought the battery out, got on the intercom, and called the dude who was supposed to install it. He wasn’t appearing. Minutes passed as she frantically helped other customers and finally another woman came out of the back and said the install dude went home. He was still supposed to be on shift.
Wanda heard this and her heart sank. She looked defeated.
In an instant she looked at me and I could tell it was the look of “oh great, now I have to piss off another customer, just kill me now I wanna quit”. Being that I was over-polite with her she asked, hesitatingly but with hope, “do you know how to install a battery?”.
It was a question of desperation from her. Installing a battery is easy-peasy, and I was also desperate – to get out and get home.
“Sure, I just don’t have any tools on me”, I replied. She immediately smiled at my acceptance and excitedly said “Oh I have those for you!!” She hurredly ran to the back and rolled out a cart on wheels with all the tools and stuff they use to change batteries in the parking lot. I happily grabbed it and said “sweet, this won’t take long”.
So I installed my own battery. It took a whopping 15 minutes.
I rolled the cart of tools with my old battery on it back inside, gave it to Wanda, and she looked at me as if I was a superhero. I said “bye” and she said “bye sweetie!”.
Wanda’s day sucked, but I made it suck a tad less. Because if I were most any other customer I would have been angry and complainy about not getting the service the store offered.
Being Less Complainy Makes A Better World
In general, I roll with things in life. Because regardless of what idiotic complainy people online seem to think, the world is great and it’s only getting better. As it has been throughout history. We live in – by far – the best time in human history. Anyone who claims different doesn’t know shit about history.
All this said, I’m the last person you’ll ever see sending back a dish at a restaurant because “the chicken is too dry”. Those kind of people to me are aliens. I call them complainy. Sure I have my limits in that scenario. If there were cockroaches on my plate or razorblades in my chicken then I’d probably send it back.
We’ve all heard of the hedonic treadmill. It gets us to continually want more and better things with the expectation of increased happiness. But when that happiness wanes, as it always does, we then up the stakes and demand even more. And the cycle never ends.
We’ve also all heard famous stories of big-wig celebrities going ape-shit because the stagehand didn’t bring them the right brand of boutique bottled water. Or of similarly dip-shit celebrities saying to a police officer when being pulled over “Do you know who I am?”.
Those folks are so far out on the complainy scale and so detached from reality they might as well live on Mars.
Perspective
When you’re less complainy in life and can step back and have gratitude and appreciation for how good things are, you live a better life. Oh and you’ll save money too.
In my case with the car battery story, stepping back reveals a crazy scenario. When I was installing the new battery in the parking lot I had just discovered that the old one died less than an hour ago. And because modern life is so amazing I had a cool device to jump start my car without the assistance of others, and only had to drive a mile and a half to get a new battery! I even had the choice between 4 different brands, because of course I would.
And remember the first one lasted 8.5 years! Just because the store wasn’t able to deliver a service the woman told me they had, is well, a minor thing in the grand scheme.
The word “perspective” comes to mind.
Being Nice > Being Complainy
Wanda’s job sucks. The guy who normally installs batteries job sucks too, which is probably why he left early.
Changing a battery is easy and I appreciated her attitude and the way she was tying so hard to do her shitty job. While I was out in the parking lot the frugal part of me thought for a second “I could probably ask for a small discount for doing this”, but I quickly squashed that. The job took me all of 15 minutes, and I got greasy hands. Big deal. I like being self-sufficient.
Plus I didn’t want to make Wanda have to do any special override on the register to give me a refund or ask for permission from a store manager who probably wasn’t even there. She was already having a shitty day and she seemed like a genuinely nice person who’s life circumstances had her stuck working a crappy job at an auto parts store.
And asking for a small refund – even though most folks would think that fair and logical – would to me be more complainy than I wanna be as a person. Heck, it was a Tuesday afternoon and I’m semi-retired, I had no job to go to that day 🙂
Chalk up another tangential benefit of being financially independent.
So there you have it financial warriors, a simple story to glorify the joy of life as a non-complainy person. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go on Twitter to bitch about stuff…. 😉
oh, it’s just awful going to the parts store in the hood, but i hope you went to an auto zone as we own shares. i couple of winters ago we thought mrs. smidlap’s battery had breathed its last breath so i brought it to the napa auto parts store and it turns out it just needed a charge, which was free! i picked it up the next day and drove home and reinstalled it.
you’re absolutely right about showing the customer service people some grace. why act like a butthole? same goes for waiters and bartenders. one young guy a while back didn’t know how to make a manhattan on the rocks. it has two ingredients (if you don’t count the bitters)! he was trying to secretly read the recipe on his phone when i stepped in and helped him out.
Yes it was Autozone 🙂 I’m mainly super-impressed with the DieHard that lasted 8 years which included about 5 or 6 trips to the Daks in winter dealing with below zero conditions. So I bought another Diehard. And you should’ve shown the bartender how to make a mufferito
In some ways, you might be glad the installer left early. Imagine what a crappy job he would have done if he already has a bad attitude or dealing with personal problems.
When customer service person say to me “Hello”, “Can I help you?”, or “How are you?”, I respond with my answer and then ask them “how are you doing?”. Sometimes I get a look of confusion/shock. They ask me to repeat it. They say most people don’t ask them that question. That is pretty bad…
Who knows what is going on in their lives, just like no one knows what is going on in your life, but no reason to treat others like crap.
Very true, part of a battery change involves cleaning the corrosion and gook that builds up on the terminals. I question whether they would have done that. My secret to a good rapport with service workers is to use their name if they’re wearing a name tag. Every time I do that they look very surprised and smile, because 99% of folks don’t do it. They have a name, they’re a person not a means to a transaction. Use their name. Thx for stopping by!
Thank you for your actions, going about life grounded in empathy and compassion is transformative. It is something I have worked on extremely hard the past decade and I is something that I will need to work on my whole life. The Dalai Lama , Confucianism and the Stoics are ways of approaching life I have read a great deal on during this time, they allow me to act in the manner you did and I am grateful you are sharing this simple mindset and personal experience as an example. Now as an elected community leader I need to practice is more than ever, I know I can and know I must.
That being said, I will finish my comment with a simple lighter note and quote from an American we all know…
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – Nick Offerman
I think the vast majority of us will be working on it for our entire lives. And Stoic philosophy has had a huge impact and influence on me. As for that quote, that’s mic-drop material!
I wish I could say I’ve never been a dick. Alas, that ship has sailed. But while I always tried to treat other people like I wanted to be, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to accomplish this now that I’m sorta retired and not rushing from one thing to the other.
I try to leave plenty of gaps between stuff I’m trying to do during the day, which 1. keeps me from being rushed 2. allows me time to BS with people I randomly run into 3. when I run into someone who’s having a crap day I can give them a few extra minutes to try and turn that smile upside down.
It’d be wonderful if I was doing all of that out of selfless altruism or whatever, but honestly is just makes my life better. Being less complainly for sure helps all parties involved.
Kudos to you for being a good human. Glad you’re rocking it.
Dude my ship sailed eons ago 🙂 And yes, time freedom makes us less hurried and thus tends to a more empathetic take on life. It makes it easier to see the stress in others who don’t have that time freedom and who are “turned on” to the stress and anxiety of the full time working life. Thanks as always for the great comment!
Just came back from my vacation in Poland and felt the same kind of thing when I got back in the Netherlands. When I think of the way of life over there, I couldn’t help but think of how people in the Netherlands are super pampered. The poorer regions of Poland (Lublin region e.g.) have a lot of small towns (about 1000 inhabitants or less so), and pretty much need a car to get somewhere as there are no biking/pedestrian paths on the main roads. Young people tend to escape those towns as there is not much else to do besides going to church, work, drink and family/neighbours. In more developed regions kinda the same thing (Kraków region e.g.), 30 minute drive from your very hilly town to the nearest city. The public transport bus service failed somewhere after the communist system fell and it’s in the hands of the market, which means only profitable transport bus services are around. Not to mention a more authoritarian government than in other European countries.
And in the Netherlands people complain about the typical first world problems. When I’m going to work, my commute consists of 15 minutes of cycling, 15 minutes of train transport and 10 minutes of walking. The highways are efficient and don’t have to go through hills and mountains, everything is pretty close. Yet a lot of people complain about the typical issues with car commuting ;). Most people here can’t even imagine what a lower life standard looks like I guess. I didn’t mind shitting in one of those outdoor toilets with a hole in the ground.
Great comment! I’ve never been to Poland but have been to some other Eastern European countries and many developing countries and yes, what we in the rich nations complain about is often laughable when you’ve seen what others deal with every day. As for outdoor toilets that are nothing but holes, man I could tell you some stories from Uzbekistan but I won’t gross you out….
That’s a great way to live. Complaining make yourself and everyone around you miserable. Solve problems instead and enjoy life.
I guess a lot of people are having a hard time and they behave like jerks.
Yes, and social media fuels their jerkiness…
Great post dave, I’m like you I generally wouldn’t send stuff back….accept for the time I found a paperclip in my chicken sandwich at Boston Market, which I almost ate BTW. I did send that back, in exchange for a free meal. But I didn’t post it on social media ;-). Great story about Wanda, and an ever better message overall!
Holy smokes, swallowing a paperclip could have been very very bad for the GI system, glad you caught it!
Excellent article, I agree 100%. I’ve never sent a meal back in my life, if the dish isn’t great, well I now know what not to order next time I’m at that restaurant. Of course, I’ve never found a paperclip in my sandwich either so…..
Good story about having compassion for another human being – if we all did that the world would be a much better place.
Thanks for stopping by George!