As I walked to my car after work last night, I checked my phone for my email and any voice messages that I had received during the day. I have to be careful doing this because often times I get lost in my messages and either walk past my car and end up in some random place in the parking garage or I walk into walls. But that is a whole other story.
On this night, while looking through my phone, I noticed that I have a voice message from a number that I did not recognize. I dialed into my mailbox and listened.
The caller was one of my neighbors. And she was calling to tell me about a complaint that she had with the car parked in front of our house. She went on and on about how the weather conditions were just horrible today (which they were, we got 4 inches of snow in about 2 hours) and since our road is so hilly and narrow it is not safe or right for us to park a car on the road in the front of our house. She repeatedly said that we needed to move it. It was dangerous and so on. Then she ended the message with something that really just rubbed me the wrong way. She said this time she was just making a friendly phone call.
This time!? This time!? What the hell is that suppose to mean?
The whole message just annoyed me. Its not like we consistently have a car parked out in the road. We do our best to keep the cars in our driveway but sometimes it is not possible to make it up the hill into the driveway, especially in bad weather.
I spewed and sputtered about this to myself most of my drive home. I decided that even though this lady was a big meanie, the best thing to do was to give her a call and try and make peace.
But I really wanted to call her and give her a big piece of my mind. But as the saying goes, you capture more flies with honey than vinegar.
So I would apologize. I would tell her that we would try and not let this happen again. I would tell her that is was actually our babysitter’s car out there and that we would tell her how she should park. I would use all my people skills and smooth out all her ruffled feathers.
I would be the bigger person.
And I was.
In fact, I was such a big person that I had Jeff make the call.
