Nathan Exposed » Every Day Is a New Challenge

Every Day Is a New Challenge

I wonder what it is about the human mind that always wonders over to the dark side? You can encounter 10 nice people when you start your day. Somebody says “Good morning”, another person holds the door open for you. All it takes is one rude person, and your whole day is ruined.

That’s how life is. I try to believe that the world is made up of mostly good, kind people. But all it takes is one nasty person to ruin your whole outlook. When that happens, I just feel like throwing in the towel.

I started working for myself in March of this year. I had the most amazingly consistent run of good clients. From March through this fall, it was one good person after the other. But lately, I’ve been on a negative streak.

I don’t know what happened. It just seems like lately I encounter the angriest, cruelest people you could imagine. They have all this baggage and rage, and I guess they think a website designer can heal them? I have no idea.

They love the work, but they don’t want to pay for it. They’ve had a bad experience with a designer in the past, and now I’m going to pay for all their sins, and they even want a discount because the last designer ran off with all their money. Their Father didn’t give them enough hugs when they were children, and now it’s all my fault.

It’s crazy. These people should be committed to an institution. I try not to focus on the negative, but when I tell Rodney about the people I deal with, his mouth is just hanging open in shock.

I am a designer, I make your website look pretty. I cannot take away all the pain in the world, and I do not want to hear about your messy personal problems. It only makes my job harder.

But that’s my challenge. We are faced with challenges every day. We have to try and find the good in every situation. We have to forgive and accept that people don’t really mean the things they say and do to us. Even more difficult, we have to maintain the courage to treat every person with a clean slate.

When I’ve just finished dealing with one nut job on the phone, I still have to turn around and be nice to the next person I talk to, because they don’t know what just happened and they deserve to see the best of me.

The best of me. That’s what I have to be. Every day.

Thu, Nov 29, 2007 @ 12:30 am | Filed in Abundance | Permalink

4 Comments

I can sympathize. I’m in the restaurant business in New Orleans and it is very much the same especially with the locals.

Posted by James on Thu, Nov 29, 2007 @ 5:28 am

It is amazing, weird, how ONE BAD can screw up TEN GOODS. But, then, there are great people in this world (like you) who can overlook the bad and just plain old carry on like we’re supposed to. Learning how to seperate the wheat from the chaff…

Posted by Lewis on Thu, Nov 29, 2007 @ 11:50 am

well. know i love you.

and yes. all it takes is just 1. argh!

Posted by chris on Thu, Nov 29, 2007 @ 12:11 pm

yeah, better than working at the gap at christmas though, right?

ima with you though. maybe go back and get a degree in psychology and you can charge double!

Posted by eliot on Thu, Nov 29, 2007 @ 6:22 pm