First things first: This is a picture Jay took of me last week with his phone when he got home from San Diego at 11pm and we went to have a super late dinner and I got kind of drunk on two beers because I was so tired so we took selfies on the couch at 1am to contribute to the non-drunk tiredness?
Tuesday information, you know.
The other thing. This morning I was teaching yoga, as I do on Tuesdays, and a woman came in late.
Like, kind of really late. It's a 45 minute class, and she came in after about 13 minutes, walked all the way to the back of the room wearing sneakers, then walked to the front of the room and kind of looked around.
I thought she might be an employee needing to find some equipment or maybe a mom who had a kid with an issue in daycare (I hardly know anyone else who works at the Y since I'm only there for my classes and refuse to go to any staff meetings because, just, no), so as she was just sort of....standing there....I asked her if she needed anything:
can I help you find someone or something?
Please note at this point I had the class (and me) in a plank pose and just decided that we would hold it while we sorted this whole thing out. Core work, you know.
The woman stammered something about times being messed up and I gathered that she wanted to take the class and was sorry to be late. I told her to of course join us, she grabbed a mat, took the class, and I had completely forgotten about the entire thing after class.
Then, one of my regular students came up and told me HOW GREAT it was that I had let her join the class late.
Let her join. At a facility she pays to be a member. In a class that I'm paid to teach.
The student told me that sometimes when people come late the teachers are really rude and huffy, which completely baffled me. Utter lack of professionalism aside, who cares? Life happens. Time get messed up. Traffic is a thing. WHO EFFING CARES?!
The fact that a yoga instructor (or any human) would prevent someone from enjoying any piece of a class (within reason, safety concerns, all that) because they messed up the time is just SAD. And dumb. And a waste of that person's irritation scale, which should be saved for REAL irritation, not fake stuff like messing up a time and super politely apologizing for it.
Irritating like when you spend $18 dollars for 2 people and wait for 37 effing minutes for a sandwich that you didn't order but don't realize it until you're in the car and too irritated to go back. THAT KIND OF STUFF. Real stuff. (heh)
I think the most strange part of the whole experience was that my lack of irritation was surprising to my student, because she sees it so often in other instructors. It didn't even dawn on me to be "extra nice," I wasn't faking it or doing a weird customer servicy thing. Frankly, I just wanted to stop talking while holding a plank.
Apparently, though, general courtesy like not huffing at a stranger is, well, strange.
I don't think I have a point, other than a little bit of an unsettling feeling that me not being nice at all (you've met me, ain't no fakeness going on) was considered above and beyond because, by comparison, everyone else in this particular situation is mean.
Maybe it's a question, more than a point. Why are we so quick to be huffy with people we know nothing about? When did we become fundamentally unable to offer the benefit of the doubt before dialing the irritation factor up to a million?
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