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As I recall, it was Hawkeye on the television show M*A*S*H, that said, “It’s nice to be nice to the nice.” I laughed when I first heard his statement, but I have never forgotten it, and experience has taught me that, although it should never be the primary reason governing one’s behavior, being “nice” can pay big dividends. I was witness to such an event a few weeks ago. While vacationing in Las Vegas at the Treasure Island hotel, my husband, Scott, and I tried to obtain tickets for their stage show “Cirque du Soleil.” We were told that the tickets were all sold out, but that we might want to come and wait an hour before the performance, since many people who have reservations fail to show. We had seen the performance before, but my husband’s boss and his wife, who were with us, had not. Although our traveling companions told us not to worry about getting tickets on their behalf, we knew how much they would enjoy this fabulous production. We arrived at the ticket line an hour and fifteen minutes before show time, but there was already a long line. We took heart, however, when the reservation clerk told us that the night before around one hundred tickets had been turned back in. While Scott waited in line, the other three of us wandered back and forth between the line and the hotel gift shops. When the time came close for the show to begin, we hung around to see how Scott was progressing. Many people in front of him had been called to the counter and had gone away with tickets in their hands and smiles on their faces, but when it was Scott’s turn he was told there were only two tickets left and they were way at the back. The reservation clerk went on to say that Scott could wait there if he wanted and perhaps two more tickets would be relinquished. Scott had been visiting with people around him in line. He told the clerk that since we had already seen the show and the people next in line had not, he wanted them to have the tickets. The clerk looked at him strangely and then said, “Stand over there.” After the people next in line paid for the two tickets, the clerk called Scott back to the counter. Without any explanation, she handed Scott four tickets. We were still puzzling over our luck when we walked into the theater. The usher studied us with squinted eyes and asked, “Who do you know? These are Steve Winn’s tickets.” Steve Winn is the owner of the multi-million dollar hotel and the tickets were the best in the house. I guess we will never know the full story of the tickets--why they became available, why they were offered to us, but I’d like to think it had something to do with Scott being nice. I usually try to be nice too, but sometimes I slip up, like the time I raced a car to the last remaining stall in the parking lot, only to learn minutes later that I had beat my boss’s elderly parents to the last close parking spot. I still feel bad about that and am now more cautious about who I race to parking stalls. I have learned, however, that lessons on nice can be learned from experiences that are not. This is what happened to me.
To say that Hector
needed help with his interpersonal skills was like saying the
eruption of Mount St. Helens was a puff
of dust. As a neighbor to us in a small housing development in
the canyon, we never knew if he were going to be
friendly because he wanted to borrow something, or grouchy
because we
had
done something he disliked, previously unknown to us. |
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