A few days before Thanksgiving, a time for being grateful and giving, my friend April woke up to find her phone not working.

She has two jobs, both working with clients, and a working phone is a necessity. She was forced to re-commit her day to hours of driving around and waiting in lines, first at the AT&T store, then at the Apple store, before finally getting a replacement phone.

After a stressful and unproductive work day, she returned to her car to find this on her windshield:

Never mind the fact that the author of this note misspelled "douche bag" during their moment of superiority, or the fact that she was forced over the line by the person who was parked in the space next to her when she pulled in, or that she is one of the most positive and uplifting people you could ever meet; why was it necessary to call a total stranger by that name? Why was it necessary to leave a note at all? The person could just as easily have ignored it and gone on with his or her day. Surely there are more important things to be concerned with.

So to those people who enjoy criticizing others:

Please stop. If it takes being rude and disrespectful to people you've never met in order to feel satisfied with yourself, now may be the time to take a moment for some deep introspection. This applies to leaving condescending notes on windshields, cutting people down on social media for holding different beliefs than yourself, making fun of others for doing things differently than yourself, making rude remarks to people in public, or in any way being a jerk just for the feeling of superiority you get from it. It is never okay to make another human being feel small. It happens far too often in today's world of keyboard warriors and "I'll do what I want, when I want, consequences be damned" nincompoops. Truly, enough is enough!

I'm asking you to please stop and think before acting. Think of the person, the actual human being on the other end of your insult. Try to imagine who this person is, what their life may be like, or what your words might make them feel. April handled it with a great attitude, as she always does, using it as a message to her Facebook friends to remember "there is always something to be thankful and grateful for," and to not "...sweat the small stuff." Maybe take this opportunity to learn a little something from her and from her experience with the self-declared parking lot police.

If you want to leave a note for a stranger, maybe you should consider some words of kindness. The world could use a lot more of that.