A Calf in the Road

Every day when I'm driving to work I pass some cow pastures near our house. Today when I passed one I saw three calves all standing together. As I got closer I realized that one of them was on my side of the fence! I was afraid that he would get out into the road and be hit by a car or get lost further away from the pasture - also, I assumed that the fence must be broken somewhere for him to have escaped. I wasn't sure what to do so I called 311 (Mecklenburg county's info line) and asked for animal control. The operator told me that she could take the call and so I explained the situation. She said I should call 911 because a police officer would have to come out and determine the owner of the calf, so she transferred me to 911 and they said they would send someone out. I would have never called 911 about something like this since I don't really think it was an emergency, but hopefully someone was able to get the calf back in the pasture. It was funny to me that however this calf escaped the pasture he still stayed right beside the fence and the other cows - he wasn't wandering down the road or into neighborhoods. I think these cows are owned by Hodges Dairy Farm, so when I got to work I also left a message on their answering machine in case they got my message before the police got out there. Hopefully, the little calf was able to get back in the pasture with all the other cows!

Un-Common Courtesy

Recently Chad & I encountered situations where people we interacted with did not seem to understand what "common courtesy" is. I am really starting to think that "common courtesy" is not so common anymore. I don't know where the ball is dropped on this, or if people are just becoming more and more selfish and just do not care how their actions may affect someone else. I think our nation and culture as a whole promote selfishness and looking out for #1 only. Check out some of the T-shirts around. I have seen countless people wearing shirts that say "It's all about ME" or some other derivative of that message. But, the two situations we experienced recently would not have requried some huge effort on the part of the people, but just a small display of courtesy - which apparently is still too much to ask of people.

Here are the situations:

At work Chad was working and another vendor needed to move the trailer Chad was working on, but instead of letting Chad know and explaining the situation. This other vendor just starts moving Chad's tools, etc and did not say anything to him at all. Chad quickly moved his stuff out of the way and was fortunately able to work elsewhere for the rest of that day. He did speak with the other vendor the next day and ask that if something like that happened again could he just let Chad know the situation. I mean how hard would that have been?

My situation was that I was contacting a large group of people that attend our church about possibly joining a small group. Out of 11 couples only about half even responded to me at all. Now keep in mind that these people gave their information willingly knowing that they would be contacted shortly. Throughout my time as a small group leader I have been continually blown away that so many people just never respond - when they have ASKED to be contacted! How hard would it be for them to quickly e-mail back "thanks, but this isn't going to work out for us right now."?

I hope that somehow we can come back to practicing courtesy and somehow make is commonplace again. I don't think it's too much to ask of anyone to be nice and courteous in small everyday things. For now unfortunately, courtesy is all too un-common.