Being Judgemental

I have no idea how many times I have been taught this lesson, yet I still stumble in it. I was seeing a patient a couple of days ago for fitting of a pair of glasses. The boy was about 4 or something. He was really cranky that day and I had a hard time trying to help him select a frame suitable for him. His dad spent a lot of time trying to coax him into trying the frame, but to no avail. So in the end we had to wait till he was asleep and I had to estimate the fitting instead of trying it proper on him. Frustrating to say the least. After the saga, my colleague was commenting that the patient seemed spoilt. I told her he was definitely a spoilt brat.

Next came the collection. They patient had high power so the glasses would take longer time to make. Worse of all they came on the last week prior to school opening so that made things a little more tight. The father then decided to bring him down after school one of these days. He then called on Monday and asked whether the glasses were ready to be collected on the same day. I replied that he could come down on Tuesday after I confirmed with the manufacturer. By then I was quite irritated because I had already informed him that the glasses would take some time to be ready and I would definitely call him when they arrive. After that he passed me over to his wife who had a ton of questions to ask because she was not around during the prior appointment. After I hung up, I was telling another colleague that they were a nuisance, which was really mean cos their surname was 'Nguyen' and I conveniently insulted that.

It was only after that when I found out that the reason the father called up to inquire about the glasses was because he was planning for a business trip around collecting the glasses. Oops! Then when they turned up, the boy was pretty much well behaved and followed all his dad's instructions like greeting me, allowing me to fit the glasses on him, thanking me, etc. The reason he was so cranky during the last visit was because of some eyedrops we had placed on him which caused him to be drowsy. After that, they gave me some cookies which they bought from Starbucks. Ouch! That was painful. All my judgements were totally off. I was really taken aback. Okay, another lesson learnt. Hopefully, I would learn not to shoot off too fast from now on......