I got yelled at today. That doesn’t happen often and I never react well to it. It’s something I work on, but it’s a hard one for me. The circumstances in this case are slightly complicated. I have a customer (yard mowing business, for those of you don’t know me well), I’ll call her M for this post. She owns three properties that I work at: two rentals and her own residence. Both rentals have dogs: Rental #1 has little corgis, who bark, but the owner always calls them in without any incident. #2 has pit bulls. Not happy smiling slobbering pitbulls like some people have, but angry barking growling pitbulls whose tails don’t (ever) wag. I won’t go in the yard with such dogs. So when I approach the gate on my riding lawnmower and these two angry beasts come running up to kill me, I usually just sit there and wait. After a bit some human will come out the door and holler, and the bullies will run into the house. That was fine with me, it worked. Until today. Today it all went as usual: bullies barking, me waiting, listening to NPR on my earbuds while I waited for a human to discipline the pooches. Not in the cards today, I guess. A tall curly-haired fellow came storming out of the house. (Careful there, sir. Is ‘storming’ the right word? It’s a little loaded…yes, I believe it is the correct word for his onset.) Instead of calling his canines to heel, he began shouting in my direction. I couldn’t hear him, of course. Well, there’s my not-so-acute hearing in the first place, and then the talk show in my ears, and the blockout hearing protecting earmuffs made of plastic and foam. I’m always surprised, and you may be surprised to learn, that many people see this get-up and then talk to or at me as though they think I can hear them. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks to train a new customer. Anyway… I shut down the mower, took off the head piece, removed the earbuds: and here is more or less what I heard: “…never know when you are gonna be here! If you were on time we’d get the dogs inside. But you just sit there on your mower! Why don’t you come up and knock on the door and tell us you’re here?” (The door is inside the gate. With the dogs. An idiotic suggestion, really. I will pass over that and continue): I didn’t respond to the idea that I should open a gate and enter into a place where dogs that clearly want to savage me were running around. I actually couldn’t think of a polite but appropriate response. I do try to be polite. It’s the Knight in me, I guess. I also didn’t know what to say about his obvious fury that I was sitting on the mower waiting for him to do as the inhabitants of that house always had done in the past. Was it that this was in some way insulting to him, or that he saw it as an attack or a criticism? Perhaps. On my part, it was just the only practical solution to a problem. Having failed to find a response to those points, I fell back on the first partial sentence I’d heard: “Well,” I said, (politely I believe) “I’m always here on Monday…” “No, you’re not!” he said. Now, to be strictly factual, he’s right. Let me see, most recently I hit his place on a Tuesday because it was the day after Memorial Day, and on Memorial Day I was tearing down my camp at the end of the Egil Skallagrimsson Memorial Tournament. Three weeks previously I was pushed back to late afternoon because in the morning, and again at noon, cars and vans were taking up all the nearby parking. That one I lay on the inhabitants of the home. Of course in the rainy season, mowing is catch as catch can, and there is no schedule. Duh. But from Mayday to Halloween, I am usually on schedule. Damn reliable, actually, compared to some in my profession. So it wasn’t what he said that set me off: it was the tone of voice. Like he was cussing out his teenaged kid, or lecturing a servant. That gets me every time. I am not a child, and I am nobody’s servant. There is the further implication that I’d told a deliberate lie…in reality, I might very well have put the correct qualifiers on my statement, save that he interrupted me before I could finish and as much as called me a liar. That’s another one that sets me off. So I looked at him and said: “Fine, mow your own (expletive) lawn.” Then I put the earbuds in, the headset on, and started the mower and loaded it into the trailer. When I took the headset off, he was still yelling at me to come back and mow his lawn. I shook my head: “We’re done. I’m gone.” Then I ‘made it so’, as J-L Picard would say. Truth to tell, I didn’t trust myself to be in close quarters with him. I didn’t trust him either, he was crazy mad. Later, after mowing some of M’s residence, I knocked on the door there. (The dog-of-that-house is a fine fellow, very friendly.) M’s husband said she was in another city, so I told him what had happened. “Okay, I’ll tell M and we’ll deal with this.” The expression on his face led me to believe that it wasn’t the first time this tenant had misbehaved. Later, shortly after I arrived home, I got a call from M. Long story short, she backed me up. I needn’t go into any gossip about this fellow and his dogs; indeed, M told me very little, and the details of this trouble are not my affair. Now here is an amusing sidelight. According to M, the tenant texted her a ‘long, complicated message’ about what had happened. How did he get a long message out of that very short interaction? I don’t know. Furthermore, complaining to M may indicate that he thinks I ‘work for’ her, and that she can discipline me. Just to be clear: I run a business, she is a client. I will do a lot to keep her happy, and I have. But she’s not my boss. Anyway, M and I will (I hope) work something out. Probably I will just skip that lawn if I can’t get it in the ten-to-noon timeframe on a Monday. So I probably didn’t lose the work with my precipitous departure from that job site. This is a fail on my part in other ways, though. Here’s one way: if that tone of voice can set me off that way, then people can set me off by using it. That is a weakness in my defense against assholes, and one that I am working on (as I said). The great samurai Musashi wrote: have a defense, but don’t be defensive. I have to say I wasn’t the least bit defensive when dealing with this particular situation, but I also didn’t allow the confrontation to reach a point where that could be an issue. That, I suppose, is a sign of maturity. But it would have been better had I continued the conversation in such a way that we reached common ground. Another way that this is a fail on my part is this: a truly advanced person like, say, Ursula LeGuinn or the Dalai Lama would say that I should use this experience as an opportunity to feel compassion for the man who attacked me. When I contemplate the situation, I see that this fellow is possibly ill-educated and badly raised by his parents. He may believe that hectoring tradesmen is the best way to get them to do as he desires, which I think is a doubtful proposition. Therefore, he probably gets very frustrated on a regular basis, when his preferred tactic fails miserably. He may well be the sort who cannot learn from such failures, and is hence doomed to years of ugly and frustrating interactions with his neighbors and co-workers, etc. Until age and exhaustion substitute for maturity, and he’s too tired to be a confrontational person. Contemplating this possibility, I do feel a very tiny amount of compassion for him. I feel more compassion for his wife and their roommate, though. So, enough of this for now. I will revisit this incident in my mind a few more times, I am sure. As always with such moments, I will try learn a lesson from this dust-up. (“Oh, no, not another learning experience!”) And, hey: this guy will definitely wind up in one of my novels. Heh.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 04:23:17 +0000
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