This year, in addition to all the usual New Years resolutions–lose weight, use less crack, etc.–I decided to add “Be nice.”   
Well, on paper I’ve been losing weight, if you turn the paper upside down. And using less crack has been hard ‘cuz I didn’t use any to begin with (but it’s such terrible stuff, zero doesn’t seem like enough: less than zero would be better.) But the hardest resolution to keep has been “Be nice.” (Or to put it in the long form “Don’t take it out on anyone whose fault it isn’t.”)

When I told my daughter Elina I was going to write a little something about the difficulties of being nice, she said, “You’re qualified.” Don’t put too much stock in what she says; she’s a teenager.  I think most of my friends would say I’m a pretty nice guy, but that’s the thing, see. It’s not difficult to be nice to people you like.  And it’s not difficult to be nice to hateful public figures who are destroying the planet, because you don’t interact with them, mostly, you don’t get to be nice or unpleasant with them.  What’s difficult, finally, is being nice to irritating strangers.
And there are so many of them.  I’m talking about the grocery store checkout clerk who’s chatting with her friend while customers (me) are waiting.  I’m talking about the PG&E guy who gives you a four-hour time slot when he’ll drop by to repair your gas line and then he doesn’t come.  I’m talking about the jerk who honks his horn when you step off the curb to cross the street, because you’ve made him slow down.  I’m talking about the jerk who steps off the curb to cross the street when you’re driving in your car, so you have to step on the brakes.  I’m talking about the guy in India who takes your call when your brand new computer doesn’t even boot up.

But when I stop to think about it, irritating strangers are just the inevitable byproduct of so many of us living in big communities with intricately interlocking but emotionally unrelated lives that criss-cross in physical space.   There’s some law in physics that you can’t go from A to B without squandering a certain amount of energy as heat instead of work, because there is always friction.  Must be some law like that in sociology too.  Friction is other people, and when they block the energy you’re trying to put into getting something done, that energy turns into heat.  Irritation. 

Clocks make it worse. Clocks make us think we can be in certain places at certain moments and get various things done in certain fixed increments of time. We construct our plans around those expectations.  I know I do anyway.  And it’s all an illusion.

I remember once I went to the post office needing a single stamp. There was only one guy in line. And one at each of the two windows. And two postal clerks on duty.  and none of us needed much.  And the two of us who were in line waited fifteen minutes. The guy in front of me was shifting weight from foot to foot like he had to pee, but it was just irritation. He’d already been waiting ten minutes he told me.  Maybe it was only five minutes. Maybe my fifteen minutes was only 7 and a half, I don’t know. Time elongates in those situations. When my turn finally came,  the postal clerk move like someone peaking on LSD–he examined my letter, he remarked on the destination, he said he knew someone who’d once been there, he weighed my letter several times, he searched for stamps and failed to find any, he forgot what he was doing, he started fussing with his meter machine, he asked what I did for a living, he weighed my letter again, he asked did I want to insure it? No! Register it? No! Certify it–

“No,” I barked. “Just give me the stamp!”

“Don’t be so grouchy,” he said, “Everybody’s grouchy today.  Must be something in the air.”

The thing about irritating strangers is that you’ll never see them again, so there’s no distinct downside to snapping at them. On the other hand, my wife points out, there’s no upside. You don’t get better service by snapping at people, you don’t feel better for having snapped, you don’t get anything.  That’s why I decided that this year I’m going to try to be nice. Just as an experiment. Just for a little while.  Just to see how it goes.

And it’s going kinda’ good, actually.  A few weeks ago, my Internet connection went down. But not totally down. It would work for an hour or two, go down for an hour or two or three. Comcast came to fix it four times. They could never find anything wrong with my connection, but they’d fiddle with something and it would be working and they’d leave. Ten minutes laer, it would go down again. Infuriating. Just the kind of situation in which I’d usually be yelling at the repair guy. But I was nice. It wasn’t his fault. Blame no one whose fault it isn’t, I said to myself. and then a little voice said, “Hey if you don’t’ take it out on whoever happens to be there, you might never get to take it out at all. But I bit my tongue and resisted the urge.  And in the end it turned out that a fellow down the street from me was causing all the trouble. He had filled his house with all sort of illegal equipment, and he was stealing Internet from his neighbor and screwing up the whole neighborhood. The Comcast guys caught him. They were driving down the street and they detect signals leaking out of his house like water out of a cheesecloth bag. (Did you know a guy could drive down the street in a truck and detect signals leaking out of your house? Me neither)  Anyway, Comcast could, they caught they, and they stopped the problem. It turned out the repair guys had been doing the best they could, there was only so much they could do. it wasn’t the fault, it wasn’t the fault of Comcast, and when it was over, I was glad I’d been nothing but pleasant with all the repair guys that came to my house during that ordeal.  Because along with all the irritations of modern life, one of the worst is strangers being irritated with us. And that, it turns out, is one unpleasantness one can actually adjust for the better. By being nice.