I had a wall built this week, an experience that was more stressful than it needed to be.
After missed phone calls, the bricklayer failing to turn up when he said he was coming due to rain that never materialised, and confusion over a gate I was wishing I’d left the old wall up until it crumbled gracefully like its owner.
When he did arrive to get started his radio was turned up so loud with pulsating dance music I had to shut my own windows so I couldn’t hear that or the ill-tempered and patronising way he spoke to his labourer.
In the evening, after he’d finished, I convinced myself that the wall wasn’t straight.
The following morning, walking the dog, I could be seen crouching down by neighbours walls peering along the tops of them to work out whether other people’s were better looking than mine.
Later, the man arrived who I’d paid to do the work and who’d sub-contracted part of it out to the bricklayer.
He spent two hours clearing up, washing the buckets that the builder hadn’t bothered to wash, overseeing some final touches, and was generally so helpful and courteous that all of a sudden the wall looked much straighter.
A client couldn’t make a session and gave me late notice.
He was apologetic and paid me anyway because it was too late for me to replace him in my diary.
Later in the week someone else didn’t show, didn’t tell me they weren’t coming, and didn’t acknowledge my follow-up to make sure they were OK.
“Everyone misses a session at some point. Sometimes they forget or something else crops up, it’s the way that it’s dealt with that makes a difference,” I tell my daughter as I’m trying to get my hand out of the puppy’s mouth.
She’s ahead of me,
“Do you remember that time you forgot you had a session with a client who hated himself and he told you that his therapist forgetting about him was a new low?”
“Yes, and I apologised a lot,” I tell her, feeling a lurch in my stomach at the mention of it.
While I was thinking about how almost anything can be dealt with in a reasonable manner if you go about it the right way my daughter was asked to put out some washing which made her curl her lip and huff.
“Oh dear, it’s hard being a slave isn’t it?” I say to her with a laugh.
She text’s me later to tell me that using the term “slave” in such a dismissive and trivial manner has upset her boyfriend.
“I told him you wouldn’t have intended it to be racially offensive and he was fine about it,” she wrote.
When I see him I apologise. I thank him for calling me out and tell him that he’s helped me realise that sometimes how you do something is just as impactful as what you do after all.
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