A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!
“You Will Be Missed,” and Other Dubious Compliments
When “thank you so much” can be insulting
By Ed Goldman
When a host whose invitation I’ve had to decline sends me a gracious note saying, “You will be missed,” it’s nice—but it’s also what I’d like to hear the head of a firing squad whisper in my ear the moment after he offers me a blindfold and a cigarette but right before he start to command his troops, “Ready…!”
I’ll admit that the aging process may be breaking down my acceptance of well-intended but somewhat dubious remarks. Like if I thank people for picking up the tab for a meal and they say it was their “pleasure.” Was it? And if so, why haven’t they done it more often? I’ve given them plenty of opportunities over the years, God only knows.
Gratitude platitude attitude
And speaking of God, why does He or She get thanked when I break my back completing a rush job for people. I call them and say, “Well, I got it done,” and the response is “Thank God.” No, friends: thank me. If the thankers are being a little more spiritual than that—meaning, they’re thanking God for having made the guy (me) who completed their rush job, I suppose I get that, and I’m even a bit humbled by it. But while they’re at it, shouldn’t they also thank the maker of my computer for its not having crashed when there was a rush job to be completed (by me, if I didn’t make that clear)?
I suppose gratitude is a tricky thing, as Vice President J.D. (Junior Dictator) Vance was trying to point out to Volodymyr Zelenskyy some months back.
You’ll recall that the gist of that moment was that Zelenskyy didn’t seem sufficiently grateful to our beloved BLOTUS (Bloviator Of The United States) for obfuscating on whether the U.S. would help him defeat Russia—which you may also recall is the country that had started a war with Ukraine because Vladimir (Vlad the Defenstrator) Putin wanted access to more tall buildings with windows to throw people out of. Who says I don’t understand global politics?
Adding to this is that people don’t always take compliments well anymore. If you tell an Ozempic user who’s dropped enough pounds to create three new mid-size adults how good they look, they may actually resent the compliment. Seriously. Their responses could even be along the lines of “Why, didn’t you think I looked good when I could tilt a Tesla onto its side just by sitting down in the passenger seat?” Or even worse: “I haven’t lost weight. Same as when I was in high school.” In short, the reward for your kind commentary is outright hostility—or an attempt to make you feel like an idiot for not realizing they’ve looked exactly the same since birth, just a tad taller.
We’ve all heard that people in certain fields don’t take well to well-intentioned compliments. I suspect that nuclear physicists don’t require us to tell them, “Geez, you’re pretty bright.” Supermodels probably aren’t waiting for you to tell them, “You look very nice in that outfit” and home-run kings really aren’t lining up to hear us praise their posture at the plate. I learned early on that actors get slightly miffed if the only thing we can bring ourselves to tell them when we go backstage after they’ve delivered a three-hour performance in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” is that we were awed by how many lines they had to memorize.
As someone who often forgot many of his lines on stage in my mercifully short-term acting career, I can tell you that getting a remark like that would have brought grateful tears to my eyes. And if the people smiled and walked away after that, I’m sure I’d have called to them, “You will be missed.”
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
