A smile costs nothing

A smile does not cost you anything. This is so true, still so many people fail to realize it. Or at least this is what certain incidents make me conclude.

Some days ago I went to the neighbouring shop to buy some salami for dinner. I was not overjoyed to see that the grumpiest of the shop assistants was on duty. "10 dag of that kind, please," I told her. When she put some on the scales, the screen showed 12. She asked if it was OK but I told her to put the uppermost slice back. She looked at me with the deepest possible hatred on her face, as if I had committed a terrible crime, and said, "Yeah, I should have known you were used to chemists' accuracy!" I should not have been surprised, after all, she was always making this kind of remarks. If it had been the first such occasion,  I would have started to wonder what she disliked so much about my mother and her being a chemist. But I knew that her behaviour had nothing to do with my mother, she talked to everyone like that. She was for some reason angry with the world around her. "Anything else?", she asked, after throwing to me my salami like a dirty cloth she could not wait to get rid of. I think even if I had wanted to buy something else, I would have said "no, thank you".

A couple of days later, on a cold Sunday evening, about ten people (me included) were standing at a bus stop. Most of them were students coming back from their one-week autumn break. They were clutching the handle of their trunks and were shivering with cold. When the bus arrived, they all rushed to the door, assuming they would get on so much faster if they were pushing themselves forward. I waited patiently for my turn, I saw no reason to hurry. It was then that I noticed a sticker on the bus window. It said, "A smile and a little kindness do not cost you a penny."

The bus drivers must have encountered too many bad-tempered passengers, I thought. I remembered my incident in the shop and I was wondering where I should put such a sticker to make sure my favourite shop assistant would read it. I also wondered how many of my fellow passengers had seen the message on the window. Not many of them, I thought, for it seemed there was only one thing in the whole world they cared about at that moment: to get on the bus as fast as they could so that they did not have to stand any longer.

Sometimes I wish today's world was not so fast. We would need more time to pay attention to what is around us because we would not think that the biggest truth might be found on a sticker on the bus.