Good, Better, Best!

Arlene Blackman Yolles ♦ April 17, 2016 ♦ 4 Comments

How many of us have had the proverbial “bad day?” You wake up late for an appointment; when you go to fill up with gas, you find you left your credit card home; a driver cuts you off on the street; you sit down in a wet spot of ice cream; a lady in the supermarket curses you out because you’re too slow to move your cart, etc. We’ll all have days like that, well, here’s the other side of that!

GOOD: While visiting my granddaughters in Manhattan, I stopped at a fruit stand and chose 3 bananas. I proffered up a $20 bill with the excuse, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything smaller.” “Take them,” he said, you’ll pay me next time!

BETTER: I have an old shoe that needed a re-gluing of the sole. On the way to the shoe repair shop, I was figuring out what he would have to charge me for it to be worth it; otherwise I’d throw the pair away. My guess was that he would charge about $20; I probably would pay that, no more. I walked in and said, “What will you charge me to repair this?” He asked me, “How much would you like me to charge?” Thinking quickly, calculating my “break-even point” and possibly a bargaining position, I answered, “$10.”

“$5,” he said, “see you tomorrow.”

BEST: This morning I woke up to the first really beautiful day in a long time. Since I recently got my Trek bike tuned up and the bearings replaced, I was looking forward to taking a ride through town to the beach. I got on the bike and realized that the seat was way too high for me! Ordinarily, this would take my husband all of 2 minutes to fix but it so happened that he was really under the weather and hadn’t even gotten out of bed. Understandably, he was in no mood to accommodate me but would if I waited, oh, let’s say, an hour or two. I decided to phone the bike shop that did the work on the bike for the sole purpose of complaining to them about not putting the seat back to the right height, and letting off a little steam. “We don’t open for another hour,” said Charlie,” I’ll come by and do it for you.” And he did!

Now, how often do those lovely happenings occur? Kinda restores your faith in humanity!