How Dave made a total tool of himself...

There seems to be a trend lately, where religious zealots will walk up to me and decide I need "faith" in my life.  And these people have decided that it's perfectly okay to go up to me, and give me a little piece of bible tract paper.  It pisses me off for two main reasons:

1. This person is basically saying "Hey, my way of life is right and your way of life is wrong, and I have actually gone through the cost and effort to print up these pieces of paper to show you just how stupid you are."
2. This person has looked at me, and, entirely from my appearance (a fairly average 20-something) that I am faithless by his standards - I mean, how does he know I'm not already some crazy bible-humper concerned with getting in other people's business in order to "save" them?

Okay.  So that's where this story starts.  Flash forward to, um... tuesday (so, two days ago?  Can we "flash forward" to a point in the past?) I'm sitting in a waiting room, reading a copy of Hornby's brilliant Long Way Down when I hear a man shuffle up to me.  And then, he hands me a piece of paper.

"No, THANK YOU." I say, trying to hand it back to him.  But he's already walking away.

This ticked me off to no end.  I mean, high-minded preachers are bad, but to do so in a hospital?  Where people are sick, and often in a vulnerable bargaining stage?  How tasteless is that?  So I get angry when he starts walking away.  Angry enough to say again "Excuse me, but you can take this back," rather loudly.

Then I looked down at the tract, already getting ready to crumple it up.  It had some crappy little charm on it.  And the attached note read, basically:

"Excuse me sir, I am sorry to bother you, but I am deaf and have no means of making income.  I am selling these charms for $4, and if you could buy it out of the kindness of your..." and so on and so forth.  I think you get the point.

So, naturally, I'm feeling like a douche.  Especially when this man handed the charms to other people, who read it before making an asinine comment, and then looked up to glare at me.

And it got worse.  See, I had no money on me.  So when he came back, I had to give him the charm back, rather than pay him.  He looked at me foully, and shuffled off.  And I, obviously, felt like a total tool.