The Chaos Effect

Today I was mortified. To my utter horror and disappointment it was in myself. There I was, standing at the entrance to the supermarket with one of my co-workers, watching as a man and his wife walked into the store. On their way in I was dumbstruck as the man walked into one of the displays of merchandise outside knocking some of it down onto the snowy dirty ground. "Hey, no problem, accidents happen," I thought to myself. It was then, however, that I realized this guy and his wife weren't going to pick it up, they just kept going.

At first I thought perhaps he hadn't noticed. Maybe they were too engaged in a non-existant conversation to hear the loud thump as it hit the ground that I could easily hear 20 feet away. Maybe only he noticed and was embarrassed to bring something like that to attention with his wife. Maybe he couldn't feel the bump as he walked into the display because a butterfly had flapped its wings at some instance in the past on the other side of the world, the chaos effect having taken it's full course at that precise moment causing a freak gust of wind to exist only at that exact location and nowhere else.

I think not.

It was a moment later, as these thought paralyzed my mind and body, that I saw both the man and his wife turn around and take note of the felled products glancing back and down at them on the ground. Not only that, but they then looked around and made eye contact with both myself and my friend. Then they both just turned around and walked into the store as if nothing had happened. They both acknowledged what happened and that they weren't going to a thing. There was no possibility that he just couldn't hear, no possibility that he was just embarrassed and didn't want to notify his wife, there was no possibility that the Butterfly of Chaos had found another victim. They both just didn't care.

It was then that I felt a disgusting feeling of shame. I hadn't said anything. I lost myself to inaction. I was unable to hold someone accountable for their actions. If I can't do this for such a small showing of an uncaring someone-else-will-clean-up-my-mess attitude, how can I for something greater?

Thus, after my moment of indecision, I exchanged a glance with my co-worker and walked over and cleaned up this other person's mess. I played right into this man's delusion that it didn't matter, that someone else would fix it, that he was entitled to just leave it there for someone else. On the other hand it was about then that one of the employees who had seen this happen walked out to clean it up. By the time he got there we had already picked it all up. He looked at us and said, "Thank you." A very simple statement, but it was good enough. It's too bad the man and his wife hadn't wanted to hear it themselves.

So much power in those two words. After hearing them I didn't care as much. I still cared, but slightly less. I had just become The Stealer of Thank Yous.