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Printer Malfunction

By Ryan, February 3, 2007

My mom likes to keep things that remind her of milestones in my life. She has my learner’s permit, and she’s also a lock to hold onto my paper license when my picturized one comes in the mail this week. Miscellaneous papers that I wrote for school, awards I won for Math/Science Team competitions in middle school... the list goes on. So, today, when I made my first solo trip to fill my Malibu named Tony* with gasoline this evening, I thought I would save the receipt for her to store in her special box for me.

Only problem was, the pump I filled up at had a printer malfunction. It said on the convenient* little screen on the pump that I could go inside for a receipt. So I go inside, expecting to tell the cashier “Hey, man, I filled at Pump #1 and I need a receipt... can ya hook me up?” and the guy would be like, “Sure, boss,” and he’d give me this nice printout that looks like the receipt I would have gotten outside. Well, no. Instead, he goes, “How much gas did you put in?” So I told him it was, like, 11 gallons, and that I didn’t know for sure how many gallons exactly, but that it came out to $21 even. So this guy writes on a piece of paper in doctor handwriting “Feb 3 07 pump 1 $21.00” and something that may have been his signature... or a picture of a horse... with five legs. Yeah, a five-legged horse. That’s what it was.

I’m sure that Mom won’t mind not having this memory of my first gas trip, but it’s amazing that something as small as a printer malfunction can lead to sacrificing something like a priceless memory. Okay, so a piece of weirdly smooth paper that thanks me for buying my gas from Albertson’s and tells me to try their groceries* is relatively trivial, but sometimes small things lead to big disasters. Like one sarcastic comment can ruin a person’s week. Last year, I was having a bad day when some little midget freshman asked me where I got my shirt... which said “COLORADO” in size, like, a thousand font. Agitated that someone would ask such a doofie question, and trying to maintain my reputation as a comedian, I responded by saying Hawaii with the Napoleon Dynamite voice and facial expressions. Well, that was enough to put the little 14-year-old* through the roof. He made the intelligent choice to punch me in the back of the head right in front of the assisstant principal, earning him a week of suspension.

Okay, what he did was wrong and can’t be blamed completely on me, but I could have avoided it by just doing what Jesus would have done. Then everyone could see me not doing the easy thing (laughing at an idiotic question) but rather doing the hard thing (helping this kid with his social skills). I often say that I don’t have enough opportunities to show God. So do a lot of us. But in reality, we get chances all the time. We just tend to let them go by because we weren’t thinking about our choices.

Labels: Gems, Relationships

{ Posted 9:10 PM | E-Mail Post | Edit Post }

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