My tragic flaw...

Can I really call this 'tragic'? I've been thinking about my morals lately. This is how it began, so every morning at work, I buy a little bottle of soymilk and cereal and since they upped the price of soymilk the total is now $3.05 from $2.75, more on that in a sec. But a couple of months ago, one of my coworkers got the same thing except for the soymilk. instead, what she did was get her cereal, open it up, and pours in the soymilk from the bigger carton reserved for coffee drinkers and uses that milk for her cereal. And then she only pays for the cereal. I thought that was wrong for her to do. But when I asked my co-workers yesterday, when I bought my soymilk/cereal combo, they said that was okay. So there i am - conflicted between this seemingly inconsequential action of "stealing" milk. i don't think I can do that. something screwy inside ethical values won't allow me to do this little thing. when i told this to my other co-worker, she argued it'd be like if someone charged you something less for something you know costs more, you wouldn't argue, right? wrong. remember when I mentioned the price of my morning combo. last week, someone charged me the old price, and i corrected the person at the register and paid what the correct amount is. mind you that it's all under $4, so i didn't mind paying the extra 30 cents, like if I got charged $5 for something worth $100, HELL YEAH, i'd pay only $5! shoot, what i'd be thinking in that case is that it's the checker's bad for getting that wrong - plus, i could argue, through a lesson from my business law class, that it's the fault of the checker and the cash register for charging the wrong price, it's not mine, so i have to pay that lesser amount. but, i digress, i paid the higher amount for what makes my mornings complete at work.

mind you as well, i don't fair too well under peer pressure. as a matter of fact, i get more annoyed with someone telling me what to do, that i WILL do the opposite no matter how right the other person is. i guess that stems from my dad always telling me what to do. it's that nagging feeling i hate that makes me want to rebel more than anything.

but, going back to my moral dilemma... deep down inside, always defer to what's LEGAL instead of doing something that's not warranted and saying that it's okay as long as I don't say anything to anyone. why would something be alright to do if i couldn't tell anyone about it? duh, doesn't that make sense to anyone but me?! and to compound the issue, I've been raised this way to think this way. When I got into a car accident about 10 years ago, really minor, my dad told me to claim that my car radio stopped working because of the accident, when it stopped working 2 years prior to the mishap.

there was an incident at work, where (geek speak alert) i was told by our chief site architect that it wasn't right to use iFrames on any of my pages. my other co-workers just said to use it anyways and not tell anyone that i'm using it. it won't crash the site! no ill effects will become of it. i even knew that. but because it was a rule - i sought out another alternative. an inefficient alternative, but it worked. unfortunately, that project only lasted a few weeks. but still i stood my ground... which maybe didn't bode well with my colleagues, but damnit! i have my OWN morals to live up to.

i purposely wrote this in my blog, and because of it's length, so that no one else would read this BUT i just had to get this off my chest, cuz sometimes it feels wrong to do what is right - and that SUCKS!