Being Mindful vs Being Transactional
Every couple of years, I receive a notification that it’s time to stop by the vehicle inspection station operated by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Thus I paid a visit to the vehicle inspection station yesterday. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that a trip to the DMV is not something that I look forward to — and yet, yesterday’s visit proved to be a valuable learning opportunity.
A queue of cars is to be expected, and after sitting in the queue for about 10 minutes, there was only one car left in front of me. The driver of that car had gotten out of the car as requested by the technician, and was standing nearby while he ran the necessary diagnostics. Importantly for our story, the driver wasn’t paying any attention to what the technician was doing — yes, you guessed it, they were staring at their phone.
I could see that the technician had finished what he was doing, and was waving his hands, trying to get the driver’s attention, to no avail. This went on for a bit, when finally the driver looked up. Seeing that the technician was done, the driver got back in their car and left.
As I pulled the car up, I left my phone in the car and got out. The technician had noticed that I had seen the whole thing, since I waved to him when he was trying to get the previous person’s attention. We struck up a conversation, talking about how many kids we have, and about being Dads.
We also talked about the general lack of attentiveness of most DMV customers. He shared with me that I was the first person in about two hours to have a conversation with him. We laughed about it, but the laughter shielded the painful reality that he experiences every day.
The interaction that I just described lasted for just a few minutes, as do so many of the person-to-person interactions that we all have. Each time that we are distracted, it’s a lost opportunity, to connect, to empathize, and just to be a human being. Let’s all try to do better.
