Nicely Walking the Line

I had an interesting interlude with one of my employees yesterday.  He was bemoaning the fact that passengers were uniformly rude to him.   I asked him how many times he had apologized during his eight hour shift.  He gave me a blank stare trying to comprehend where I was coming from.   

He’s a grumpy guy to begin with so he was totally out of his depth.  I’ve always found that no matter what culture you’re in – a foul mood is usually very contagious.  If you act pissed off then you become a donor to the general malaise that will soon find you.

Being nice can have the opposite effect, even if the people around you do not merit that emotion.  People respond in kind to the emotions they are dealt.  A couple of times I found myself in situations in the Arab world where I overcame some Anti-American feelings by simply being nice.  Again in most cultures (well, except for the French) people want to enjoy their personal interactions.  I think 95% of us are hard wired to be decent.  I told the bus driver to think about apologizing to passengers if they complain to him about the bus being late even though it wasn’t his fault.  We’ll see. 

I finished The Long Walk by Stephen King yesterday.  It is apparently his earliest work written while still a college student and published as a Richard Bachman book many years ago.  I found it as I wandered through the Amazon kindle store where I erroneously thought I had read everything King had written both as himself and Bachman.

The story involves a group of 100 young men who enter a contest in a present day, alternate totalitarian USA.  They start walking from the northern Maine (of course) border and must maintain a 4 mile an hour pace or they are summarily executed by following soldiers.  There are no breaks, no sleep, and leaving the road results in immediate execution.  The winner is literally the last man standing. 

As with any book by King his characters immediately come to life and it’s heartbreaking to see the friends of the lead character slowly succumb.  King also brings the reader into the walk where I swear my feet started hurting experiencing the Long Walk through his description.  Any aspiring young author should avoid reading this because to realize King wrote this as a college sophomore could lead to despair. How can anyone be this good so young and maintain that excellence for forty years and counting.  He’s a national treasure. 

The Master - The True "Roland"