Small-town life

I hate it when, just because you’re innocently honest (or naïve, gullible, whatever you want to call it!), you’re punished for it. More and more often, I think we're too honest for our own good. I mean, we're the people who get the wrong take-away order and go back and pay the difference the next day!!

We’re small-town people, my brother and I grew up in Howick, my folks have lived here for years, we’ve all been involved in the high school in one way or another over the last 30 years. And we support the local businesses – if they’re good to us. When our favourite video store closed down years ago, we had to find another one. We settled on the one near our (at the time) favourite supermarket and the excellent (at the time) pizza place. They had a really good range of movies and seemed to be nice people. The business changed hands (maybe more than once, I’m not sure) but we stuck with it, because of the stock of movies.

One day, I thought I’d better check if we had any fines – that’ll teach me, if I’d just kept my mouth shut, it wouldn’t have happened… And I was told that a new release that I had rented 3 weeks before had been returned two days late, so I owed 2 day’s rental on that. Nice person that I am, I paid, even though I was pretty sure we’d returned that one on the due day. I thought about it, discussed it with my mum, who had watched the movie with me – and we distinctly remember the situation, because we had to watch it quickly before we returned it, so the maximum ‘lateness’ was 2 hours, not 2 days.

And I didn’t do anything about it. I’d already paid the money – good luck trying to get it back from them. (And I think maybe the owners should take a closer look at their books.) But I won’t be going back there. I know it won’t make a difference to them, because there are a lot of people who will go back, but I will not be one of them.
Plus, we don’t like the supermarket anymore and the pizza place kept messing up orders and undercooking their pizzas, so we stopped going there ages before they closed down. Just means we can avoid that whole little collection of shops!

I guess at least we can live with ourselves - but only honest people feel that way. Dishonest people couldn't care less and that's why they're dishonest... Life lessons learned the hard way.