The Formula For Kindness

It is sometime in December, and my son is four months old. He’s my first baby, so I’m definitely exhausted. My husband tells me to go to the store to pick up some formula since we’re low, but to also give me some time to myself for a little bit.

We have a few coupons because my son needed to be on some specialized formula, which was expensive, so any money we could save would help. It had been a long week, and this particular day was a day when it felt like nothing was going right.

I’m at the store getting the formula plus a few small things to treat myself when I get to check out. I had to go through the regular manned checkouts because of the coupon (it had to be run through like a check). I pulled it out of my wallet, and she started to run it through when it declined. She tries again, and it fails. She calls over the Customer Service manager to see if they could figure out the issue.

When it still didn’t work, she took me over to Customer Service to try it there, so I didn’t hold up the line. Interestingly enough, she and I have the same name and the same spelling, so we were talking about that.

She ran the check through again, and it failed, and she told me that because the check had been folded to go in my wallet, the numbers at the bottom wouldn’t read.

I lost it. I started bawling my eyes out. I was exhausted, my husband and I were tight for money enough as it was, and now, I had ruined the coupon we really needed to pay for the formula.

I told the manager that it wasn’t her fault and I was sorry for crying, I was just overwhelmed. She told me to wait just a few minutes, and she went into the back to make a phone call. She came back and told me that the coupon wouldn’t go through, but that she was going to give me the $15 off, and she would cover it. I tried to tell her that this wasn’t what I was trying to do, and I could pay full price, but she told me not to worry about it and to go home and get some rest.

That was almost a year ago, but I still think about it often because I truly wasn’t trying to get anything my way, but she still saved my mental health that day. I left a five-star review for her online, and I doubt she ever thinks about me, but I think about her all the time.