Well, I’ve encountered this a lot, especially with an ex-boss who is a great guy, but has an almost inborn inability to use words in a precise way. I had this basic conversation with him so many times.
But the one that got me to post this here was the instance of me (very ill advisedly, as it turns out) sending an email to the family of my ex-girlfriend, apologizing for hurting their sister/kid.
I got back this email from a brother that said, basically, “This isn’t a forum for discussion about your relationship”, to which I responded, “I wasn’t trying to start one.” This turned out to mean, “My sister would not appreciate you commenting on this without her permission, no matter what you’re saying.”
So that’s point one. The other thing is that he actually included the phrase, “S— happens.” I thought this was an extremely cavalier attitude to take about his sister’s feelings, so I wrote back and told him that I thought it was very important to her, and to please be nice to her.
He then got offended that I implied that he would be anything else, and told me right off.
It turns out that his comment was apparently supposed to mean, “Things like this happen. I understand that. Just don’t go discussing it in public if you don’t know it’s ok with her.” I still think that in both these cases he did a terrible job of it in both cases. But now in his book I’m the total dork who doesn’t get it.
I’m really sick of people acting like I should be clairvoyant about what they mean. If they’re not going to bother saying what they mean, they should just stop using the English codec we seemed to be using.
As I said before, at least have the grace to restate what you meant when it becomes obvious that you’ve managed to phrase something in a way that is vague, instead of acting like I’m the idiot because I didn’t happen to read your mind.
And in general, the lack of grace in so many areas from that brother of hers completely underwhelms me.
