Warm Thoughts for the Souls of Mean People

i do not comprehend mean-spiritedness. If I did go out of my way to make other people’s lives less joyful, it would damage my own level of joy, and I don’t care to have my level of joy damaged or diminished.

Now, I pay a lot of bills. That is just an aside. Paying bills doesn’t make me any less joyful; rather, I like paying bills just fine, because every time I do it, I have one fewer bill in need of payment.

There are aspects to the actual task of paying bills that do diminish my joy, however, and I can only imagine that these are the result of mean-spiritedness.

Like most of you these days, I pay most of my bills on-line, but I still pay things like the electric bill–which is different every month–with an actual check. Both forms of payment occasionally bring me to instances of joy theft.

When paying actual paper bills, I have to wonder just how dark is the soul of a person who would place the perforation a scant millimeter or two from the bend in the paper. Surely only a vindictive hater could be so cruel. “Yes, I know you’re a bit anal retentive, and here’s a little ‘screw you’ from me for that.”

Then, when paying bills online, I just wonder how bleak must the outlook be for someone so dead-set against helping his or her fellow humans get along with the getting along as to not design the the cursor to automatically go to the next field once I’ve entered the required numbers for part of my social security number, a date, or a phone number.

It’s like, “No, you can’t enter any more numbers here; everybody knows the social security number sequence is three-two-four, silly. We know that too, but we’re not gonna help you by kicking you to the next field; we’ll just give you that dead sound to tell you what you already know: while five might be the next number you need to push, you need to physically tell us that you want it to go in the next field.

I imagine that the person who designed a site in such manner, or who at least didn’t do anything to fix it, is bitter and lonely.

I say a little prayer for such people that they have some moment of clarity and discover that living a joyful, positive, and helpful life is so much easier. I say a little prayer for me that I will encounter as few of these people as possible today.