Nice to Mean in 2.9 seconds

I went to the bank yesterday to fill out a form so the preschool can directly withdraw their tuition from my bank account. I went up to one of the customer service reps and asked him if he could help me. He said sure, take a seat. He asked me to fill out what I could and as I started to write very slowly, he grabbed the form from me and said he would fill it out. The girls were with me and Silvia was getting a little antsy, so she was playing with the extra pen attached to his desk. He handed her a piece of scrap paper, and, in English, said Here you go. Silvia began to draw on the paper, but was still antsy - it was the end of a long day. I told her to say thank you. She did and said it was very nice of him to give her some paper.

He filled out the form then had to go process it, which took a few minutes. He came back to the desk, handed me my copy of the form, and told me we were all set. I told Silvia it was time to leave and she started to put up a fight. I told her 10 more seconds and started to count to ten. At about three, he looked at me and said people are waiting. At five he said all done and grabbed her paper, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash. Silvia totally lost it. I picked her up, turned to him, and asked for the paper back. I put her in the stroller and let her cry right outside his cubicle for about a minute while I got ready to go. I was pretty steamed. She asked me, between sobs, why he had done that? I told her it was a very mean thing for him to do. From nice to mean in less than three seconds.

As I was walking away, I was thinking that if I was really Israeli, I would have yelled at him for that. And he would have yelled back, and neither of us would have felt good at the end. Then I thought about it more and realized that if I was a bit quicker, I would have asked for the paper back and then asked him to apologize to her. And I would have waited until he did it. That would have been the better response.