Today hopefully I’m going to challenge your perception of integrity.  Our entire life we’ve always heard that we should keep our integrity.

When I was much younger, in a much different life, I was a bagboy at a grocery store.  One day we had an onslaught of customers all at once (this was common), and one of the customer’s had a leaky milk jug.  So the cashier had me run the leaking jug back to the dairy section to put in the dairy freezer and grab a new milk (the customer was waiting, so speed was of essence).  Normally, I would drain the milk and then go back to the cashier line, I think I did, but I was not 100% sure (I couldn’t remember truthfully).  But this day, it was so crazy that I believe that perhaps I put the jug down and ran back up to help (but this turned out to be wrong).

Later, I was told to go get carts because we were out (and I performed it quickly).  When I came back inside the store, I saw the dairy manager chewing out a guy that always goofed up and was the likely candidate for leaving leaky milk jug in the dairy freezer.  Since I knew I wasn’t sure if I caused the problems or not, I jumped in to take the blame (again, I wasn’t 100% sure that I drained the milk or not).  This made the dairy manager (my friend) look bad in front of the cashiers and goofy bagboy.

Later I found out the Timmy (the goofy bagboy), also took a milk jug back to the dairy freezer, so it might have been his jug that wasn’t drained…  After my display of integrity and believed honesty, the dairy manager no longer considered me a friend, and Timmy continued to do things that got him in trouble.

So in the end, my integrity wasted and costly.

The moral of the story is, before you jump in and become the white knight

• Give yourself the benefit of the doubt, in all likelihood, I did drain it but quickly.
• Weight if the situation requires integrity.  Had I not said anything, nothing would have changed.  But by taking action, I lost a friend.
• The person I help never said thanks for jumping in. So the effort was wasted on someone that wasn’t even appreciative.
• Timmy wasn’t smart enough to realize that I was sticking up for him.

Have you ever been in a situation where a great display of integrity caused more pain than not doing so?

MR