Killing myself with kindness

I think I am too nice for my own good.

Usually being nice is a good thing, but sometimes it gets in the way.

At work, I am most often stationed in the Deseret News print shop. We have a 1940s typewriter on display to show how printing has changed through time. Typed on the paper in the typewriter is "Please do not touch me. Thank you." I try to preemptively warn people, yet people still touch it. And sometimes I will catch them "typing" (there's no ink) on it, but I don't know how to tell them to stop touching it or typing on it. (One woman this week told her son not to touch it, but then she was typing on it. I went in and asked her not to touch it. She said, "I wasn't going to, but then I saw that someone else had typed on it." If she had stopped to read what "they" had typed, she would have seen the instructions!)

This week I helped out at the Native American Village, where there is a small "stream" where kids can float tiny "canoes." (Boy, I sure am using a lot of scare quotes today!) Since the water is recirculated, they are not allowed to play in it, so I had to tell them not to play in it. I had given those instructions to one group, and then a boy stepped off a rock into the water. I said, "Please don't play in the water," and he responded, "It's called an accident." But then he kept walking in a shallow portion, and I said to him, "I don't think it's an accident anymore." As they were leaving, he was walking in the water again, which in no way could be an accident. What a rotten little brat! The area's supervisor was walking by and yelled at him "Hey! Don't walk in the water!" But I can't do that! Part of it is that I can't yell. I can talk loudly when needed, but I can't yell. But I also don't know what to say without sounding like a total jerk, especially when it involves others' children.

In my linguistics courses, I learned about indirect speech ("Thank you for not smoking") and hedging. And I came to realize I hedge. A lot. That means I say things like "I think," "probably," "maybe," etc. I learned if from my dad; he hedges a lot as well. I've been trying to hedge less, but I still do.

Not that hedging is a bad thing. We do it to be polite. But it can get excessive.

Sometimes I let people walk all over me. Like that time I almost let the salesmen jerks force me into buying a red car even though I wanted blue. (Mom to the rescue!) At work last week, I was stationed in the bank, where kids can come in to have their "gold" weighed. Some kids came in right as I was about to close it. I think they were right on the cusp, so I weighed it for them. But then my coworkers helped me close and lock my doors--if I hadn't, those kids' big families would have come in for more assaying (weighing), and I would have been trapped, because I don't know if I would have told them I was closed.

When I had a Church calling as executive secretary, I helped with a new member orientation meeting in the chapel. One Sunday before the meeting, I stood at the pulpit and said to the lollygaggers in the chapel, "It's great that you're all such great friends, but we are going to have our new member meeting here, so if you could please head to Sunday School, that would be great. Thank you!" Or something like that. And one of the attendees said something about how I worded that so nicely. It wasn't a compliment. (It wasn't an insult either; mostly he was surprised.)

On my mission, I was once remarking about how I never trained anyone, and my companion said to me, "It's because you're too nice." I think that was definitely part of it.

Sometimes I think of what I would like to say to someone. Like I would tell a phone scammer, "You should use your phone or technological abilities to good use instead of trying to scam people. As it currently stands, the world would be better off without you." Or I imagine going to a store and telling an irate customer a certain violent poem. But I don't think I could bring myself to actually do those things.

However, a few months ago, I was at a Taco Time, where I thought a customer was being very rude to the employees. I did call him out on it, but he said he knew the employees, so that made it OK. I still don't know what to think about that incident.

But anyway. This is something I need to work on. Not being too nice to the point where it causes trouble for myself.