“You know, I’m beginning to have some respect for you as a person.”
That’s the closest one of my professors has ever come to praising anything, as far as I know. I was flattered. No, really.
“(Myothername), when I came out and started transitioning, my mom went out and got me a copy of [your book], and your poetry really was an inspiration to me, and gave me a lot more nerve to be upfront with people, especially in my writing. Thanks, dude.”–said to me by a young performance poet who I had just gone up to to congratulate for the hot set he’d just done. I’m pretty hardboiled, but it still choked me up when he told me that.
*Details withheld because they’re not the point of the story.
Two of them come to mind immediately.
“[Enginerd’s real name] is the smartest guy I know.” Said by my dad last Christmas. My dad has a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins.
I’m a TA for an upper level earth science class while I’m pursuing a PhD. A first year master’s student said to me once, “you’re going to be a great professor - I come in here and five minutes later I’ve answered the question I wanted to ask you.” It was just an offhand remark, but it’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
I got an text-message once from by boyfriend, who, at the time, lived with a nice roommate. He told me the roommate had remarked casually: " You know, I don’t know how she does it, but talking with Maastricht always gives me energy".
And another one I cherish: I taught an amateur botanist’s class. One of the remarks on the evaluation form was: “I didn’t know it was possible to learn so much in three fun lessons”.
I had a tutorials one term at university with one of the leading feminist literary scholars in the world. Near the end of the term she called me a “Neanderthal”.
I’m not entirely sure she meant me to take it as a compliment.
The ones I can think of all involved work; this episode was the last and maybe the best. About 18 months after I left employment, I went downtown for lunch with my last boss. As she ranted mildly about the corporation inducing me to leave, she mentioned that they’d been through five people trying to replace me and it wasn’t working out at all. I was astonished that they’d brought in and eliminated five people in a row so quickly…they NEVER fired people for incompetence. No, no, no! she tells me…not five peope in a row. All five are working the in one job I used to have and they can’t keep up. And the client organizations are screaming constantly and yelling at her for letting the nice guy go. I asked her who was the nice guy and what happened to him. You were the nice guy. Me? I was a raving lunatic. Sure you were, she laughs, but you were a friendly raving lunatic and you always got the job done. That’s when she told me the job had originally been planned for three people when I first transferred in. When they realized I was doing all the work after about four days on the job, they just never filled any of the other positions. (I never knew that; I thought it was a one-man job.) Apparently, as the workload increased, I just kept up with it. When I left, she figured I was doing the work of six to ten sane people.
So, there you go…I’m a friendly raving lunatic!
I had a similar one to Petrobey’s.
When I was in Grad School, one of the teachers, an old-school Physical Chemist had brought in a guest speaker who’d built a calorimeter. A calorimeter is a machine for measuring the heat absorbed or emitted by a chemical reaction; if you know “how much heat” and “how much reaction” you can calculate the change in internal energy. Previous work by this same guy gave results with 8 figures and a 10% error. The new machine gave results with 16 figures and a 10% error. I pointed out that I fail to see “we set double precision” as any kind of chemical advance and asked what exactly were we learning with the new machine that we couldn’t learn with the old one… in the end, the question came up to “ok, so what is it for?”
The Prof, exasperated, said “young lady, with questions like those you sound like an engineer!”
Yup. Ingeniero Quimico Superior (Chemical Engineer), specialty Orgo, thesis in Stats, and I’d still like to know what’s the point of getting 16 figures when 15 of them might as well have been picked at random…
When I was in college in Barcelona I used to buy my comics (and, when money allowed, books) in English from Gigamesh. The owner once told me “every edition I know of is sold out, but if I ever find a copy of Neuromancer I’ll save it for you. Cristina and you are the only people I know of who may be able to read that in English.” Cristina has been one of Terry Pratchett’s translators and her work is superb.
3acres, you’re a friendly and efficient raving lunatic.
A friends of mine just said “I like you because you are one of the only people here who I can’t picture ten years from now.”
I was quite active in my high school drama society, and my final senior role was (no surprise here) Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. The Monday after our first weekend run, our school librarian stopped me in the hall. She said, “I’ve been watching you in plays since you were a freshman, and I know you’re going to go places. I saw the show on Saturday. You were just as good as Katharine Hepburn – and prettier!”
“please talk to him, people listen when you talk”
I got a good one last week.
I was at a job meeting. There are a lot of scheduling problems on the job, none of which are my doing.
So as we were meeting I came up with some (if I might say so myself) rather inspired solutions to the problems and laid them out to the construction company.
Then as I said goodbye, the construction manager smiles and says to me “Just one more thing, could you fix the economy before you go?”
I was very flattered.
The other day my roommate asked me something, and when I replied, she said “you’re better than Google”.
“If Daina had lived, I would have wanted her to be like you.”
Daina is my cousin’s baby; she lived a little less than a day. I almost cried when he said that to me.
From my old boss, " You’ve got moxie!"
From one of my best friends, explaining to her son who felt bad for the guy who dries off the cars at the end of the car wash and she explained that sometimes people take an extra job that is brainless to make a little extra cash to pay the bills ( Gas Prices were sky high.) and sometimes that is the only job they can get when there are no other jobs ( Michigan!) And sometimes people just don’t make good choices or do anything with their education (go to college) and go no where in life.
Somehow my name came up. ( I wasn’t in the car.) " What does Shirley do?"
My girlfriend flinched and sallied forth, " She’s a genius that didn’t have any money for college." ( bits about my dad dying and no money…tale…)
" But what does she do?"
“She stocks cheese at the MegaHell.”*
This brought gales of laughter to every kid in the suburban.
*I’ve since quit this desireable job for the comforts of total slackerdom. Tired of my bi-polar, panic attack ridden supervisor’s passive agressive crapping on me. I wouldn’t take that kind of crappy supervisiory twaddle for 30K, I won’t do it for minimum wage.
These might sound shallow and cocky, but understand that my self-esteem is lukewarm on the best of days, so such things mean a lot to me:
“Your parents must be extremely beautiful people.”
and
“You are the sexiest man alive in a cowboy hat. You almost give me a heart attack.”
From my childhood next door neighbour:
‘I’ve named my daughter Katie after you, because the name fills me with memories of an idyllically happy childhood’.
From another friend: ‘will you be my phone-a-friend’ Yay, she thinks I’m brainy!
A total stranger stopped me on the street one day and said "I just want to say “Thank You.” I see you walking every day and I see how thin you are. I finally said to myself “If she can walk every day, so can I. In four months I’ve lost fifty pounds.”
Proof that you never know when you might be inspiring someone.
Back when I worked as a receptionist at a gas plant under construction’s hotell for the workers, I was sent down to set up a satellite facility so the Securitas employees could check and vet new day-arrivals (i.e., people who arrived at the hotel and went to work on the same day, as opposed to the normal business which was people came, got oriented and rested for two days and then went to work.) Setting up the office, the computers, connecting to the database and setting up an extra power outlet as well as configuring the software, installing normal office and everyday-applications and synchronizing it with the gate surveilance camera took me the better part of seven hours.
I was later told the following conversation had taken place between my boss and the Securitas overseer:
SBoss: “M., you sent one guy here to do this? This is a two-day job for four different people! This is going to take bloody ages and I need the setup by monday! [This was a saturday]”
My Boss: “Relax. He’s schitzophrenic.”
SBoss: “I’m serious!”
My Boss: “So am I. Don’t tell him.”
Aside from going down to tweak the control once on sunday morning and cowriting a short troubleshooting manual on monday morning with the guy who would operate it after work on sunday, everything was in working order come monday. And this little piggy got a $3 hourly raise. 
At my old job, people would come to me for all kinds of stuff. Spelling, grammar, help with their kids’ homework, proofreading their resumes, advice on college essays, it was endless. I was very free with my time but occasionally was busy and would ask, “Why don’t you look it up on the internet?” One woman was puzzled and answered, “We don’t use that. We have you.”
A friend once commented on how yound she thinks I look, saying if she didn’t know she’d think I was about 19 (I was 28 at the time). Another friend butted in and said “Nah, early twenties, maybe, but you don’t get teenagers who are as sorted as Jen”.
The second comment pleased me far more than the first. I look young for my age thanks to good genetics, but my sortedness? That I had to work at.