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  Denise Neil  

Schooled in the art of asserting myself

As I explained to a restaurant manager this weekend that he was going to have to take my inedible $18 pork ragu pasta back to the kitchen and off my bill, I thought of my mom.

Mom has always been an assertive consumer, never afraid to let a business know how deeply it has disappointed her. If the offender thinks he will win, he is wrong. Mom will not back down until she's satisfied.

When I was a kid, this horrified me.

Back then, I was the opposite of assertive. I was a shy little girl, the one who stared at the ground when non-family members tried to speak to me, the one who refused to budge when the clown picked me out of the crowd to help him with a magic trick.

So when Mom would get going on the phone or with a clerk in a store who had done us wrong, I wanted to die of embarrassment.

If we were in a store, I'd find the closest clothing rack and disappear inside of it. If she was on the phone, I'd run to my room, crawl into my closet and pull the biggest pillow I could find firmly over my head -- anything so I didn't have to hear that awful tone she got when giving someone the proverbial "what for."

Was that $15 overcharge really worth all of this, I'd wonder. In my mind, $15 was MORE than a fair price to pay just to avoid all this unpleasantness.

Then I grew up. For some reason I don't fully understand, that shy little girl chose a profession that requires daily dealings with strangers and a whole lot of assertiveness (though mercifully few clowns and no magic tricks).

At some point, I realized that when it was my own money on the line, the "principle of the thing," as Mom used to call it, became a whole lot clearer. While I certainly don't relish having to argue with a clerk over a mismarked label or send subpar food back to the kitchen, I never hesitate to do it when necessary.

I've adopted my own style, though. Where Mom always went in ready for battle, I try to approach the offender with a calm, almost apologetic tone that implies I'm ready to cooperate. I open up that can of you-know-what only when it becomes clear cooperation is not gonna happen.

It never came to that this weekend. I'm not a complainer, really, I told the manager. But, honestly, the pretty embarrassing leftovers I served my family last week were better than this, and I didn't charge anyone $18.

Maybe I'll use the money the manager didn't charge me to invest in a very heavy-duty, head-sized pillow for my little girl.