I heard a patron express appreciation

Context
A woman called my workplace today wanting to confirm her reservation of our computer classroom for a group she was sending to the library. She did not, in fact, have a reservation, but I went ahead and made one for her. It was a little later than she wanted because I had to wait for the machines in the classroom to be freed up, as they are used by the general public when no classes are in session. In order to fill the gap between the time the session was due to start and when the computer classroom would be available, I made a reservation for the group to use our meeting room as well.

After the group arrived, they stayed in the meeting room much longer than I expected, so long that they missed their computer classroom reservation entirely. The computer classroom is one floor below my cubicle in the Main Library, so I was called downstairs to resolve the situation, at which point I told the teacher (who was not the lady I had spoken with on the phone) I would try to go upstairs and make another reservation. After I had accomplished this and checked back with the teacher, she said, "I appreciate you."

Commentary
At one workplace or another that I've occupied over my lifetime, there was a sign over someone's desk that said, "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." I was irritated with the group today because I felt like they didn't have their act together, and when I bent over backward to get them what they needed anyway, they were too disorganized to take advantage of it! I even suggested to the teacher that she reschedule for another time, rather than continue to make the machines in our computer classroom unavailable to the public, but she wheedled some more reserved time out of me. And then she said she appreciated me. I couldn't help myself; I said, "it was no problem." I just couldn't stay mad after she expressed gratitude.

The library-oriented comic strip Unshelved recently ran this installment, where the protagonist mentions you can get away with saying almost anything about a person if you immediately say, "bless him/her." When I was little, I was taught that "please" and "thank you" were magic words, and today's incident really makes me believe it. I guess on the simplest level I was feeling angry because I thought my efforts weren't being valued, and then they were!

I wonder if a lot of our anger comes from feeling underappreciated. Let's try an experiment: the next time someone's mad at you, try thanking them for something. Or blessing them.

What did you hear today?