“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 51
One difficult aspect of learning to operate your own business is the lesson of learning how to take your lumps. In dealing with the general public, a customer’s reactions will often be out of proportion when considered in the cosmic scheme of things, and yet there is no way to properly deal with this except by simply “taking it.”
Say a retail establishment has opened on time for ten years running. Suppose the manager goes on vacation, and his sub sleeps in, and because the shop was open late, a particular first-time customer comes by, shakes the handle on the door, and walks off in a huff. Suppose further that this customer decides to send an indignant letter to everyone they can think of, complaining about the lousy service.
Does the customer have things out of whack? Absolutely. Is the assessment of the shop fair or unfair? Unfair, certainly. But if the shopkeeper is wise, what he will do in such a circumstance is that he will own it-and not complain about the unfairness. We don’t want to be like a child who complains about the one unfair spanking he once got, when, like the rest of us, the real “unfairness” from his childhood had to do with how many things he got away with.