In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what my New Year’s resolution is going to be.

Now I’m fully informed that New Year’s resolutions can happen on any day of the year since they’re just motivators plopped on the start of a new calendar. I’ve given myself numerous resolutions in the past, ranging from the juvenile “get a girlfriend” to the recent “be more productive.”  The resolutions never worked out, though, and I eventually forgot about them.

Next year, I’ll remember.

I work a lot as a busboy at a pizza place (if you haven’t read my last column).  It gives me loads of time to observe people and their personalities in the midst of greasy flying pizza pans and noisy hour-long waits.

Recently, I’ve grown very fond of where I work because of my coworkers.  I’m constantly around the kindest, most interesting people I’ve ever met in my life.

And then there’s Jorge.

He’s a fellow busboy who’s been with us for a handful of months, and he’s made my skin crawl for nearly every minute of it.

Jorge stands in his white, cotton pizza shirt and black dress pants at about 5 and a half feet tall. He’s always equipped with his most potent cologne and gelled-back hair.

His appearance and choppy accent don’t bother me, though.  What’s always bugged me about Jorge is his work ethic.

When I’m doing something at work, he’ll come over and try to do it with me when I tell him I don’t need help.  For example, I’ll be counting plates for a big party and he’ll come right up next to me and start counting.  I think he’s doing it to kill time, which brings me to my second irritation.

I’m not sure if he’s really lazy or if he completely lacks common sense.  When we’re on a wait and there are tables to be cleaned, he’ll go to the dishwasher and grab a stack of ceramic plates to dry.  For some reason, we always have more than enough plates to use for the night when he does that.  When he does things like this, I want to yank handfuls of brown hair from my sweaty head and season his deep dish pizza with them.

On Thursdays, I work with Jorge.

Surprisingly, he taught me the greatest lesson I’ve learned all year last Thursday.

It was around eight o’clock—the calm after the storm—when a table of some ladies and a kid of theirs were eating dinner.  All of a sudden, the little boy began wailing with tears diving from his eyes onto his cheeks and shirt.  The women couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so they couldn’t stop the crying.

While this was happening, Jorge walked past the brokenhearted child without saying a word.  He went straight into the restaurant’s game room—the one with the racing seat and the claw machine.

He took out some money and fed it to the hungry claw game, which mercilessly spit back 30 seconds to move the three concave poles at the top of the machine.  Jorge spotted the fuzziest toy in reach and sent the claw down to grab it.  Once he nabbed it, he ran back to the table with the howling dejected boy.  Jorge handed the toy to the child and walked away.

The crying stopped.

That’s when I realized my New Year’s resolution.

I am going to no longer judge people in negative ways.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I still won’t be upset over my teachers’ delusional grading methods or I won’t dislike Mel Gibson for the twisted things he says off of a film set; those will come with time.  But it does mean that I’ll accept what the eye sees because of what the eye might not see.

I learned that everyone lives with even a little empathy in their hearts, and when you extend it, it might even go a long way.