Many years ago I got a phone call at work from someone, let’s call him F, who wanted me to apply for a job he had to offer. Apparently I had made an impression on him when I had been interviewed for another job (that I didn’t get) half a year earlier. Although this call was complimentary in itself the real compliment was when my then boss told me that she had first got F on the line and when he had told her that he wanted to get in touch with me to offer me a job her immediate reaction had been “Oh no, you don’t! I don’t want to get rid of him”.
Recently I was about to start a non-BR topic talk at the Rochester [,NY] Russell Forum, the local chapter of the international Bertrand Russell Society. (My group was until recently known as the Bertrand Russell Set.)
The talk was “Caesar, the Pope and George Eastman: The Past, Present and Proposed Future of our Calendar” and “It’s complicated!” was the subtitle.
Just as I was approaching the stand in the smallish Writers and Books lecture hall, following my name and the mention of my previous talk, the convener decided to use a literary allusion to introduce me!
But first recall three late Science Fiction luminaries who also were known to help popularize science with easy-to-understand explanations. Two of the three * are Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke.
You may already see where this is going:
I consider ‘Jack’ [my actual nickname I usually reserve for discussion groups] to be…
*-- the Isaac Asimov (!!!) of our forum… *:o :o :o
- Trans Fat Og, formerly known as:
True Blue Jack
And I think I’m going to be insufferably pleased with myself for at least until my next (roughly three years apart) talk. 
The cutest one…
I was waiting tables in an Italian restaurant and must have stumbled into some very good lighting. I walked up to my table of a mother and her perhaps four year old daughter. I spoke to them and the daughter’s eyes got huge and her mouth opened wide but she wouldn’t say a word.
I came back with their drinks and Mom was laughing. “She said you look just like Belle, from Beauty and the Beast, and Belle is her favorite.” I said “Kid, you just got yourself a free dessert.”
I was in full time ministry, and one of my “problem children” told me she admired me. “You are the real deal.”
One that happened just tonight. My new beau and I were talking. I was joking around and he said I was adorable. I said “That’s me. Short, round and adorable.” He said “Babe, you are round in all the right places.”
The most meaningful recent compliment I’ve received was on a manicure. I’m really proud of my nails, because I just quit biting them within the past few months. I’ve been experimenting with stamping and accent nails. A bank teller and a cashier both complimented me and asked where I got my nails done. I said, at home! 
Shallow, but:
About 20 years ago, I made a serious effort to get into TV writing. A friend of mine, who had read a couple of my spec scripts, related that recently he had recalled a scene he really liked on The Simpsons. It was only after a couple of minutes he realized he’d never seen the scene - it was from a script I wrote.
I used to be a member of a community wind ensemble. I thought upon its creation that it would be an artsy group but we ended up playing a lot of band music, mostly as a warm-up fo the college directors, they wanted to practice the music that their bands would do on future concerts.
I would meet regularly with teh organizer of the ensemble to pitch my ideas for a concert of music not written for band but for a wind ensemble. I eventually convinced him that it was a good idea and he asked me to conduct.
I chose music that was relatively unknown and was a complete shift from what the members of the group were familiar with. The “Band-O’s” were a bit reluctant to play something by Milhaud (which they pronounced Mill HAUD).
Rehearsals went well and I thought the concert was going great. As the musicians were filing on stage for the last piece one of the Band-O’s was walking past me chatting with a friend and without seeing me said “I’m not sure I want to play, this music is so great to hear.” I counted that as a victory.
When she was, oh, 20, my baby sister told me I was her hero growing up.
My favorite niece, who was born within a month of my first-born son and still misses him (he died when they were six) told me a few years that I was going to be a great dad.
My wife likes me to sing to her (and now the babies) and says so. I don’t think she realizes how much that affects me.
Gosh, there have been so many, it’s really hard to choose just one— but I guess the one that stands out, and really left a lasting impression, was “we appreciate your business.”
Sorry, I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry…
Which faltered only slightly when he continued, “next time you have a sesame chicken. Even better.”
When I first started getting back in shape, I used to regularly jog in the trails behind my condo. If you engage in any regular fitness activity, you start to bump into the same people doing the same thing. I would see this older lady a few times a week and we’d sort of nod or wave or smile or whatever, but no real conversation. After a few months of seeing her randomly, she motions for me to take off my headphones and says “You should be very proud of what you’ve accomplished.”
That’s the kind of compliment that, for some reason, means the most to me: totally random, totally unexpected and totally lovely!
Two stand out in my mind. In the summer of '12 I was taking riding lessons… the first time I had ridden in 25 years. A random woman I didn’t know was watching me ride and as I rode past her she quietly said “You have good hands.”
To a fat old woman who hadn’t ridden in ages, those were the sweetest words in the world.
The other has actually come from a couple, people…When I began fostering dogs, I have had a vcouple of my FaceBook friends tell me that I have inspired them to foster as well.
I couldn’t think of anything until you mentioned this. I was just goofing around on the piano one day, playing along with something, and a young girl came up and said “You can just play anything, can’t you?” Because of her age, I know it was not just a meaningless compliment.
I can’t just play anything, of course, but it was at that point that I stopped putting myself down because I couldn’t play as great as this guy or that guy. I think it even ultimately inspired me to try reading music again, even though it takes me longer than most people. For the first time in years, I’ve actually learned a piece completely from sheet music.
I was going to tal kabout the teacher who said I could “really separate the wheat from the chaff”. I once wrote a paragraph instead of answering a question that required some boring reading that basically said “I already aced this test, didn’t bother reading the material, I win” but not that cocky. She read it to the class, and I did get an A on the test.
I’ll never forget the times that my smoking hot neighbor asked if I had lost weight, or the time one of my best friends (who is a weight lifting devotee) said I was more muscular than he thought.
The best compliment I think I ever got was at a show a long time ago. IIRC it was a charity gig, numerous bands, all of them fairly “big” in the local scene. A bit after the set one of our trumpet players said “Donna Mogavero came up to me and said “Your drummer is fucking awesome” (referring to me)”. She gigs almost nightly in the area and is a real pro if ever there was one.
I was skeptical that she actually said those words. This is a lady, and someone’s mother. So, in a bit of compliment fishing, I approached her at the bar to compliment her on her set. She turned to me and said " You’re the drummer from before! You’re fucking awesome!". I’m sure I blushed and certainly stammered for a bit. I’ve never felt so validated before in my life.
Back when I was a technical translator, an acquaintance of my wife mentioned to her that “Your husband’s name is well known in our department at Sony. When we send work to ABC translation agency, we stipulate that the job must be assigned to your husband.”
Working through translation agencies, you never get complimented on the quality of your work. You have no contact with the client (the agency doesn’t want you to cut out the middleman), and the agencies certainly don’t want you to know your services are in demand (because you will feel more secure about asking for a higher rate of pay), so the only positive feedback you get is limited to the fact that the agency keeps sending you work. So it was nice to hear that my work was so highly regarded by that client.
You have a cool doorbell.
(No, I could not determine what made my normal looking doorbell cooler than my neighbors’ bells.)
Great thread.
A couple things come to mind.
At my first job, I had a crush on a girl who was probably a good 5-10 years older than me, I was just out of high school. One day she was on a break and I was working and she had stopped by to chat and during that time she smiled at me and said “You are so cute.”, and walked away while watching me almost the whole time. I could tell she genuinely meant it. She was in a serious relationship at the time (I thought at least). That always stuck with me.
Also, this one caught me off guard. I was in a computer programming class with a bunch of guy and for some reason the teacher was asking the class which one of us in the class has the most symmetrical face. Everyone, almost at once said my name. I never at all thought of my face as “symmetrical” or the “most symmetrical” but it was nice to be thought of as that and noticed so quickly.
About 10 years ago while living in New York, a co-worker and I got talked into going to a Japan-related ‘MeetUp’ at a restaurant near our office by one of our office assistants. I suspect she was just hoping to meet some single guys <g>. My co-worker and I expected it would be a bunch of anime otaku, so weren’t all that keen, but she didn’t want to show up by herself, so fine, we tag along.
The three of us are sitting at one of of the table with the rest of the MeetUp group, which wasn’t -quite- as bad as we had envisioned, but only just. Midway through our second beer, one of the guys at the far end of the table gets up, comes over to me, and says, ‘Are you DragonAsh’?
I’m rather surprised, because yes, I’m DragonAsh. I don’t know him from Adam.
He shakes my hand, and says, ‘you changed my life. I owe my career, my family, everything, to you’. As my co-workers look on with increasingly incredulous faces, he explains:
15+ years earlier, I had been an exchange student to Japan at a reasonably well-known college that took overseas students for 1-2 semesters. Shortly after arriving I moved out of the ‘Little America’ dorm, moved in with a host family, and started studying on my own. 15 months later I was one of the few Westerners studying as an undergrad at one of Japan’s most famous national universities. After graduation I went to work at one of Japan’s major banks. The university that I first studied at as an exchange student asked me to come back and give a short talk to the new crop of exchangers.
I have no recollection of what I talked about, but the guy said he was in the audience that day, and I was *on fire. *I told them what I had done, then told them that they could party away the six months in Japan, and nobody would know nor care now, but how they’d be kicking themselves 20 years from now for having wasted the experience. How living in the (essentially all-English) dorms would kill their opportunities to learn the language, to make Japanese friends.
He said it was like having a bucket of ice water thrown on him. He was in Japan only because his major had a ‘six months overseas study’ requirement; he originally had zero interest in living overseas in general, and of course had no interest in Japan or the language. He was putting in his six months and getting back to the good ol’ US of A as soon as he could.
Well, after my talk, the *very next day *he requested to be moved to the homestay family list. He left the dorm that week, focused on learning the language, ended up working as a translator at a major Japanese games software developer, and was now running his own software localization company with his wife that he met while in Japan. They now had two kids and lived in upstate New York. He was happy, loved his career and his life, and said he owed it all to one 30-minute talk I gave 15 years earlier.
How the hell this guy remembered both my face and my name after 15+ years is beyond me, but the whole experience blew me away. Being thanked for *changing someone’s life *was pretty effin’ special.
Wow, DragonAsh, that’s an awesome story. How cool to have had that much influence on someone that you didn’t even know!
I don’t know if it was the most meaningful compliment, but it was amusing and memorable:
I was in college and had a crush on a girl who lived on my floor in the apartment building. She and her roommates were all friends with me and my roommates, but I really dug her, problem was she was way out of my league. Fast forward to the end of the year; we were all out together at a bar and the planets must have aligned- I had my mojo working and wasn’t really trying. I was funny and in control and was aware of some admiring glances, from girls we were there with and a few I didn’t know. I took a shot and made my interest in my crush obvious, and to my utter amazement she suggested we ditch the others and head back. One thing lead to another and we were in her apartment, in her bed, having sex. At one point she was face down, gasping for air after her third or fourth orgasm, and somehow I wasn’t on the verge of my own, I was able to keep going. She was giving me the signs not to stop, so I didn’t. During what turned out to be her final orgasm she looked back at me, clearly wondering how this kid not nearly attractive or cool enough to get her on any other day was making her feel this way, and said “you… are… so… gifted…” That one has stayed with me.
After leaving high school and losing 30 pounds, I went to a party where a lot of my old classmates were at. All the girls kept raving that I “got hot.” It was flattering.
Aside from that, nothing really. My parents were never one for compliments that weren’t littered with condescension and/or sarcasm.