soldelata:

theactualcluegirl:

shrewreadings:

beepboop-its-a-robot:

STORY TIME:

I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she wishes she could spend more time in it but her husband is waiting in the car (OH! I BETTER BUY HIM SOME CHOCOLATE!), she piles a bunch of art supplies on the counter and then stops and tells me how my bangs are beautiful and remind her of the ocean (“Wooooosh” she says, making a wave gesture with her hand)

Ok. I think to myself. Awesomely happy, weird little old ladies are my favorite kind of customer. They’re thrilled about everything and they’re comfortably bananas. I can have a good time with this one. So we chat and it’s nice.

Then this kid, who’s been up my counter a few times to gather his school textbooks, comes up in line behind her (we’re connected to a major university in the city so we have a lot of harried students pass through). She turns around to him and, out of nowhere, demands that he put his textbooks on the counter. He’s confused but she explains that she’s going to buy his textbooks.

He goes sheetrock white. He refuses and adamantly insists that she can’t do that. It’s like, $400 worth of textbooks. She, this tiny old woman, bodily takes them out of her hands, throws them on the counter and turns to me with a intense stare and tells me to put them on her bill. The kid at this point is practically in tears. He’s confused and shocked and grateful. Then she turns to him and says “you need chocolate.” She starts grabbing handfuls of chocolates and putting them in her pile.

He keeps asking her “why are you doing this?” She responds “Do you like Harry Potter?“ and throws a copy of the new Cursed Child on the pile too.

Finally she’s done and I ring her up for a crazy amount of money. She pays and asks me to please give the kid a few bags for his stuff. While I’m bagging up her merchandise the kid hugs her. We’re both telling her how amazing she is and what an awesome thing she’s done. She turns to both of us and says probably one of the most profound, unscripted things I’ve ever had someone say:

“It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.”

The kid thanks her again and leaves. I tell her again how awesome she is. She’s staring out the door after him and says to me: “My son is a homeless meth addict. I don’t know what I did. I see that boy and I see the man my son could have been if someone had chosen to be kind to him at just the right time.”

I’ve bagged up all her stuff and at this point am super awkward and feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. Then she turns to me and says: I wish I could have bangs like that but my darn hair is just too curly.“ And leaves.

And that is the story of the best customer I’ve ever had. Be kind to somebody today.

 I didn’t reblog earlier. 

So I am now. 

Be kind. It’s worth the effort.

I, honestly, am crying. I am crying a lot. I will reblog this every thursday, because this is very important.

(via funnybrunette)

who-am-i-hedwig:

I had this girl in my class and she was considered to be like really dumb. She’d ask a ton of doubts and questions in class, which everybody would consider to be “stupid"and “silly” and even the teachers would often taunt her but she’d never stop asking. But the thing was that she’d almost always top the class examinations and everyone was like???? They all thought she was cheating and stuff and obviously even the teachers were very biased because she wasn’t so ‘smart’ in class, and she was regularly accused of cheating. But nobody could prove that she was actually cheating but the whole class and teachers totally believed that she did. I’m pretty socially awkward so I never really talked to her, but she was leaving school this year and I was genuinely curious about how she was so good during exams and how she didn’t let everyone’s remarks affect her. She always used to sit and hang out with only one girl, and she told me that that friend of hers was severely socially anxious and she’d lag in studies because she couldn’t bring herself to ask doubts in class or ask for help from others. So they had this system where during lectures her friend would write down any question she had, and she would ask them for her. And I was just so touched??? Idk but it really changed the way I looked at people?? This girl endured taunts and jeers and borderline bullying for being “stupid” when she was actually really smart and could easily have refused to ask such doubts for her friend but she did?? And brushed off everything others would throw at her for her friend?? I was just, idk it just really changed me in some way.

(via funnybrunette)