For One Night I Was a Hero

Working at JC Penney I get all kinds of customers. Some are nice, some are mean, and some just don’t say much. But last night I met a man that nearly brought me to tears. In fact, I still can’t believe I didn’t break down in the middle of the store. Here’s what happened:

The customer, who we’ll call Gary, had a tough week to say the least. Earlier in the week his brother-in-law, “Ben,” died from complications of diabetes. He’d had his left leg amputated and they were keeping him overnight for a few days and all that, when one night he decided he needed to get up and go to the restroom. He never made it. On the way to the restroom he had a massive heart attack and died.

Then, one night later, Gary’s uncle died from cancer. On the way home from the hospital Gary hit a deer and totaled his truck, costing him thousands of dollars for a replacement. He’d been letting Ben and his wife, Gary’s sister “Dianna,” stay at his house because neither Ben nor Dianna could take care of each other. You see, Dianna has cancer herself and has been going through chemotherapy. All in all, as you can imagine, Gary has spent a lot of money in the past week. One of the things he told me was, “My sister’s lost a lot of money and I’m just trying to find her some clothes that’ll fit so she can bury her husband.”

He’s trying to go as cheap as possible so I find him two nice dress coats for $70 each. He needs one more coat and he’s good to go, but unfortunately the next cheapest coat is $100-and-something and he doesn’t know if he has enough money left to afford that, because he’ll have to pay for the funeral, caskets, etc. So I tell him I’ll knock the price down to $70 like the others. He stares at me for about five seconds… and then he loses it, turning his back to me and crying in his hands for a good couple of minutes.

I’m shocked, never having gone through anything like this as a worker. I let him have his time and when he gets control of himself he hugs me and thanks me about a hundred times. I tell him it’s cool, I just want to do all I can for him. Luckily we also had coupons where you get $15 off every time you spend $75. Combined with his sister’s clothes we were able to use the coupon three times.

Going through that humbles me to no end. It makes me thankful for what I have and it makes me feel awful for complaining about small things when this guy has really had it awful. Really puts things in perspective. I don’t know what’ll happen to that guy from here on out, but I’m just glad I was able to give him a tiny bit of good news on an otherwise horrible week. I did that much for him, at least, but I wish I could have done so much more.

~ Jeff