Brain Wave

Two weeks ago… or shall I say, few months ago I lent somebody one of my valued books.  It was a short inspirational non-fiction book that can be finished in one sitting or maybe a few days.  Weeks passed and this person hasn’t returned it yet and then she seemed to avoid me in the office already.  I was bothered by this so naturally, I approached her to have a little chit-chat.  Eventually, she opened the issue about my book.  So she started explaining… yodel, yodel, yodel…. Bottom line of what she said was, she hasn’t finished reading it yet.  Doubtfully, I said it was okay and emphasized to-return-it-once-she’s-done.  Since my team would be transferred to another floor the following working day, I asked a friend (who’s on the same floor as her) to take care of it first when she returns it. 

After a few days it was settled.  My friend already had the book.  I was about to get it from him when he asked me if he can borrow it since he had already started to read it.  It was fine with me… I actually wanted him read it since its really good.

Several weeks later he still hasn’t given it back.  I understood he was busy blah, blah, blah, and it might have slipped his mind so I reminded him.  He promised to drop it off my station on his free time.  It took him another couple of weeks and countless promises before I got it back….. Finally!

Happy to have received my book that I haven’t seen for a while, I checked every part and pages of it.  I was enraged to see that some of the pages were falling off from the cover, and there were liquid stains (which I believe was from food) on the edges of my book…  Aaarrrrggghhhhh!!!

I’m not being so possessive.  But you see, it was so neat, no scratch, and intact when I lent it to them.  Secondly, it’s my prized book!  Ugh!  What added to my outrage was, neither one of them went up to me or even tried to approach me to inform about my book’s condition then (it’s mine… I have the right to know).  Well, I don’t’ know who’s to blame though coz I’m not sure whose freakin’ hands (between the two rogues) did it to my book.  Arrgghhh!

What am I trying to point out?  People these days think of themselves as “all-knowing beings.”  Most of them tend to — look at “it” not through “it.”  Probably if I open this to those guys they’d look at me as if I’m speaking Greek!  They’d think of me as a shallow-Hal.  But what they didn’t consider in the situation were these:

-         A person lending them something they were borrowing must mean that the owner who lent it is also giving his/her trust to the borrower that he/she would take care of the property. 

-         Handling something that isn’t yours should be managed with extra care.  Neither of them considered how I’d feel if they’ll return the book to me that way.  If it was an EQ test, they would have flunked it!

-         How they handle things especially borrowed stuff is a reflection of their personality and who they are in our society.  Do you get what I mean?

Arrrggghhhh!  It’s both irritating and frustrating to find out that our world doesn’t seem to run out of people who abuse trust!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 8:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.