A Lesson Learned

4 hours and 80 miles later I was no closer to where I wanted to be. In fact, I was further from it than I’d been in a long time. I was insulted, exhausted, angry that I had wasted time and money, irritated that all my good intentions and attempts were in vain, and pissed that the only one who could see it that way was me. (I’m not going to go into ranting details of my adventure, not to protect the innocent, but to spare my readers.) I’ve resigned myself to admitting that it’s no more than a lesson learned. Thought it’s a hard lesson for me to really get, I think this is finally it.

At work we have accounts called write-offs for different things like bad debt and charity. This allows you to track how the account is trending and use that information to calculate projected numbers. It’s valuable information. I think I am going to start my own write-off accounts. This experience will now be classified as a bad debt write-off. I can revisit this data when contemplating being helpful to this ‘friend’ again. I don’t subscribe to ‘forgive and forget’ because forgetting leaves you vulnerable to the same injury. In time, I’ll forgive. And with even more time, I’ll get even. ;)

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and the only moral of the story I can come up with is that I need to stop going out of my way for people who don’t appreciate it. So my question, is appreciation really too much to ask when you do something nice for someone else? Am I unrealistically demanding?

With all the lessons I’m learning these days I’m going to be a fountain of knowledge some day soon.

The Fray had it right when they sang, “where did I go wrong, I lost a friend somewhere along in the bitterness and I would have stayed up with you all night had I known how to save a life.”