I work at Target, and I was walking through the aisles on my lunch in plainclothes, talking to my mom about the stage four throat cancer my father had recently been diagnosed with. I had come to terms with the news a good while back, and with his sunny and optimistic disposition, pretty much the whole family was handling it well. Things were going promisingly.

I was walking out of section of the stationery department and into the main aisle, and didn't see a woman passing by and almost ran into her cart when she shouted "exCUSE me. PARDON me. EXCUSE me." in this amused, sickeningly dismissive tone. The worst part of this seemingly innocuous event was the way she failed to hesitate for even a moment to speak to a complete stranger in such a manner in front of her two young, and therefor easily impressionable, children. I apologized immediately, such is my nature, and rushed outside to cry my heart out to my mother over the phone. Why are people so mean-hearted for no reason? How do they not reflect on the things that impacted their lives as children, and think about what they teach their children without even realizing it? Why is a smile so difficult to bestow upon a person as you walk by them, but a frown and maybe a few nasty words can be thrown around SO EASILY...

Her little act of revenge hit me hard, and it took me my entire lunch to put myself back together. My poor mother was helpless and didn't know what to do.

As I walked back to the employee break room, I saw and made eye contact with that woman again. She made a point of stopping dramatically and throwing her arm out to let me pass.

TL;DR A lady made a mean little comment to me in a store and I sobbed for half an hour