Growing up, he was certainly a polite child; no harm in that, you might say.
At that time no one could imagine where this would lead. Early stages of the problem showed up during his latter school years. If a fellow schoolmate was rude or unkind to him in any way, he would thank them. Whereas the occasional teacher would witness such an event, nothing was done about it. So, it went on. Moving in to young adulthood saw the thing become more noticeable. Nobody found his appropriate politeness of thanking a bus driver as he got off or a waitress who brought him his coffee in any way remarkable, but on those infrequent occasions when somebody was just plain rude to him, eyebrows began to raise. It seemed that whenever he was slighted in any way, he always had a “many thanks”, or a “thank you so much”, or “thank you kindly”, ready to roll off his tongue.
All of this came to a head when confronted by a group of particularly nasty troublemakers when they cornered him one evening in an unlit backstreet alley. It started with jibes about what he was doing there and how this was their territory. This was naturally followed by him explaining that he thought it would be a good short cut to the bus stop and thanked them all for asking. Not seeing this as any kind of appreciation of their interest or consideration for his well-being, the five hooligans set about beating him up. Of course, with every blow he received, he managed to catch his breath and thank them. Needless to say that these expressions of gratitude, being continually offered in such an unrelenting manner, only served to bring out whatever dormant levels of psychopathy had previously not had a proper opportunity to come to the fore.
The result of this unfortunate encounter was that, after realising what they had done in their rage, they all ran off leaving him to die. And die he did.
Moments later, he found himself in a completely different place. Being that it was far more comfortable than the dark, cold, blood-soaked ground where he had been, he was content to stand patiently waiting his turn.
When his time came, the lovely, old gentleman before him took his time reading from the book of records. He eventually looked up with a gracious smile.
“Well, yours is an interesting case, I must say. Generally you have lived a good life, but at the same time you seem to have upset a great many people.” He nodded slowly, and went on. “Anyway, we’ve decided to let you in.”
The young man’s response goes without saying.
So, it won’t be said.