SOME acts of kindness are so unavoidable you can’t even congratulate yourself on your incredible generosity toward the little people. Here are some you just grudgingly have to do.
Letting a person with one item go in front of you
The person anxiously clutching a lunch break chocolate bar in the supermarket is full of friendly well-wishes when you let them go ahead of you, but it was never an option to force them to watch you unload your big shop onto the conveyor belt. Tesco would probably put you on the special noticeboard they have for shitty local events, maybe a screengrab of you on CCTV and a caption simply saying: ‘BASTARD.’
Picking up someone’s shopping from the floor
Clearly the person who just launched a full bag of tins, avocados and snack bars to the four corners of the earth expected you to coldly sneer and walk away arrogantly, because now they’re acting like you’re their saviour or potential future spouse. However you will subsequently wonder numerous times if you should have chatted them up during their moment of distress, proving you are a horrible, devious person after all.
Watching someone’s bag
It’s impossible to refuse what is possibly the lowest-effort favour a person could be asked to do, requiring only the movement of your eyeballs. Even so, did you detect a note of mild sarcasm when they thanked you for performing this non-task when they returned? You sincerely hope next time they’re forced to leave their bag on a train inexplicably full of thieves, junkies with the ‘rattles’ and kleptomaniacs.
Bringing your tray back at a café
A polite notice on the table asks you to hand in your tray. A prominent sign next to the bin says: ‘Please leave your tray here.’ You’ve essentially been brainwashed into compliance, so why do they act like you elected to do it out of the kindness of your heart? The answer, tragically, is that most of their customers are terminally lazy f**kers who make you look good for doing basically nothing.
Anything your mum asks you to do
There is an implicit understanding – which has often been made explicit – that you are forever in your mother’s debt after she went through the pains of labour, fed you, clothed you and put a roof over your head for 18 years. The very least you could do is cut her grass. While you’re there you might as well put a shelf up, fix her computer, and ring the pharmacy about getting her thrush cream delivered. Any protest means you don’t love her and want her to die alone, obviously.