Much of my work experience, and the way I worked myself through college, is in retail. I’m not naturally a salesperson, but through many years of on-the-job training, I learned to at least appear as one on the outside.

As you can imagine, I have a number of stories about my experience as a retail worker, both of people whose demeanor put me quickly at ease, as they treated me like we were old friends. I will never forget Sierra, the boisterous woman in the fitting room who wanted to know my personal opinion about everything she tried on and treated me like I was her best friend or the handsome military nurse I rang up at the register who was having difficulty finding a civilian job because of the discrepancies in medical training. Those are the kind of stories I like. The warm, friendly, slice of life stories where someone takes time out of their day to share a good-humored moment with you.

Then there is the other kind of stories. The kind I don’t like. The variety where someone treated you horribly. Unfortunately, those are the type of stories that are more likely to stick with you. Let’s hope that if nothing else, at least we can learn a lesson from them.

Take this one for example:

A woman was shopping at a store where I was employed and she had her two sons with her. They were also carrying around a drink, an Icee, which one of the boys dropped and it landed, top-down, onto the carpet. I was nearby and so I ended up being the one that needed to take care of the mess.

Looking back, I don’t think the woman was angry at me. I suspect she was upset at the situation and just needed somewhere to vent her anger.

Because of my neurodivergence, I often don’t act in the expected way when something happens. This woman told me that her son had spilled the Icee and that he didn’t mean to, and honestly, I didn’t hear everything she said because my brain was already miles ahead of her, contemplating what would be the best way to get flavored ice out of a carpet. Also, the incident happened a considerable time ago, which has caused me to forget a substantial portion of it, but I will never forget how it made me feel.

I cleaned up the Icee while she berated me. Later, I went into the fitting room closet and cried. The fitting room attendant and my supervisor came in to console me, telling me how she treated me was not my fault.

The thing is, maybe as a person working in the public sector, I am a role model and maybe kids do look up to me, but honestly, I don’t think I’m the person that woman’s kids were looking to, to see how we should be treating people. I think they were looking to a person who was berating a retail worker because she didn’t like the way that worker looked. She didn’t like that the worker was so quiet and contemplative. She didn’t stop to consider that maybe her kids were actually looking to her for guidance and she was the one showing them how to treat people with contempt, not the other way around.

The lesson here is that maybe we all need to just be a little kinder to each other. Because our kids are looking to us as examples of how to treat people. And while your neighborhood mailperson or grocer or barista may be a more prominent figure, those aren’t really the people your kids are looking to for guidance.

And wherever that lady is now, I hope her two sons are out there being kind to retail workers.