You know everything about a persons motives by how quickly they accept a cancellation or change of plans on something they claim they want. It’s the opposite of the frantic customer talking to customer service after being told that something they want to do isn’t possible. Whether they are legitimately confused or not, they are indignant and refuse to accept the answer and will go several rounds trying to make it not the case before giving up. The response from a person intent on doing something after being told that they can’t do it is many things: questions of clarity, arguing, requests to see a manager – but it is rarely “okay”.
The reverse is when a person gives up literally immediately. In issues of dealing with a business, there is usually little use in challenging an assertion. If you’re told you can’t return an item because it is past a certain date since its purchase or if a restaurant tells you they have no further seating to accommodate your party – if you care, you will of course challenge the assertion or try in some way to make it not the case – but in the end, its appropriate to take the answer you didnt want, say “okay” and go about your day. But in personal matters, it’s pretty much the biggest insult possible. Imagine if one of your good friends told you “I don’t want to be your friend anymore” and all you said was “ok”. You didn’t really want to be their friend, obviously. You would if THEY wanted to, but it wasn’t important to you, so you acknowledge the shift and move on as normal.
Now here’s a mesh of those situations: Personal, working in business + lots of lies about how allegedly important something is to that person. When disaster strikes, and the response is not a frantic getting-on-board to help, but is rather “okay”… you are a useless, worthless addition to the mix, not to mention a selfish liar for talking up how important the situation is to you. and then doing nothing.
Doing nothing in the face of a crisis is a resignation. Acknowledging said resignation is then necessary. When the persons response is “okay”…. they’re basically challenging you to a fight, except they’re too much of a pussy weasel to do it up front. So instead its an attempt at a graceful exit where a person will, for example, say how important doing the dishes after dinner is to them and how hard they will work at doing a good job at it and then…doesn’t show up after dinner. They just disappear. So you wait. and then someone else notices there is a stack of dirty dishes and they offer to help. So you try and contact the person who pledged to do them and they are still missing in action and then ultimately you and the other person get the dishes done – long after the person who brought it up in the first place was supposed to. This was an “okay” person. How much do you want to bet when the absent dish washer shows up a couple days later on their own time, ready to get some dishes clean, that their response will be “okay” when you tell them you did them already? Does that sound like someone who gives a crap about the thing they brought up in the first place and promised to do?
I have an “okay” person who does this with life-and-death business issues, constantly. Yesterday they made promises. Today they did literally nothing to follow through in the crucial start of the day and so, per logic, I acknowledged that they had killed their employment opportunity and that it was unfortunate. They responded that they agreed it was unfortunate. lol.
Why don’t people have any class or dignity anymore?
UPDATE: Earlier in the day there was an opportunity this person could have taken advantage of and I texted them notifying them to tell me as soon as they had a moment to be briefed on the situation. They never responded so as work continued and another person stepped up to the plate to fill the role, I texted again saying to disregard the previous text about there being something important. Their response? [I am not joking]….
“ok”.
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