Losing Respect

Respect is sometimes thought of as the only thing you cannot force a person to manipulate. If you want a person to respect you, you cannot make them through any amount of torture. Respect is a reserved quantity that is more important to anyone because you cannot steal it. Although respect matters to everyone, most people only care about the respect of a superior. An example is a person that seeks respect from his or her boss by telling on the improper work form of a coworker. This is one way that William Pitt derived the famous quote “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In my case, I have lost respect in small quantities a lot, when a friend gets arrested or when a role model does something stupid. But only one time have I ever lost a large amount of respect for anyone. To understand why I lost such a great amount of respect for this person, you need to know a little bit about my personality. I am a very straightforward person and the accepted, mundane social niceties, that everyone follows for no reason other than they conform to the status quo, bore me. I am often described as being very mean and manipulative. I like to hide behind a standard of work that generally surpasses that of the people I am surround by. I put little effort toward monotonous activities but I love to show off my prowess at a task. The one thing I cannot stand is bigotry. I am open and ready at all times to point out a fault in logic because without logic I know that society doesn’t function. That’s why when I lose respect there is a reason.

It was a cold Friday night and I was getting ready to go to the mall with my beautiful girlfriend. I was nervously applying too much cologne when my cell phone started ringing. The abrupt sound of the new hit song made me jump with a start, and then I realized where the music was coming from and reached down for the illuminated screen on my phone. I read who was calling and stopped, quizzically. I could not understand why my work would call me on the one day a week I put in to have off every week. I answered, making sure my questioning tone was blatant.

“Hello…?” I said, dragging out the “o.”

“Why aren’t you hear?” the all to familiar voice of my general manager spat at me with intent to sound annoyed.

“Because I don’t work.” I replied rather sardonically.

“That’s not what the schedule says,” she rebutted.

That is when my flaw in checking my schedule became apparent. I had not checked that Friday’s schedule because after nearly two years, or one eighth of my life, of loyal work for the company, I had imagined that they could honor my request for one day a week off. But I apparently had given the company too much credit. I decided not to argue then and bring it up later. I made a quick call to my girlfriend, who was sad but understanding and made my way to work as quickly as possible. I entered a store in mayhem. I noticed there were unused bags all over the place, garbage stacked to the ceiling and a dining room full of more customers than I had ever thought possible. I began to run orders out and clean the mess up when I was screamed at to take over drive-thru. I went there and found orders on times three hundred