The death of graciousness

Lately I've been annoyed at the ungrateful behavior of some people around me, and I've noticed a common thread: the general decline of the niceties of cheerful, polite behavior - especially at work.

People don't say thank you anymore. Some have even taken thank you completely out of their vocabulary - or never put it in the first place.

For example, a reporter came into my community relations class last week for a Q and A, talking about how she has a colleague that hates it when people thank him for his stories.

Whaaaat? You mean you write a good piece of work, get it published, impress those involved, and you find it rude when those people thank you?

Well excuse me, but I'm sure they are just being polite. If you helped them gain publicity for something while at the same time writing a great story that people needed to know about, it is a win-win. You have helped them whether or not that was your intention. If you think that them saying "thank you" means you've done them a favor, then you are looking into this polite phrase way too much in depth. It is not rude to say thank you, and to take it personally in that way is narcissistic, at the least.

I used to be a newspaper reporter, and all the negative comments from the public got under my skin after a while. If I got a "thank you" or other positive comment from the public, I held onto it like a life-line, a rare golden nugget discovered buried in the treacherous fields of journalism. It was something that kept me going for weeks.

Did your parents teach you to say please and thank you?

Mine did. Yet my students, not so much. We have something called the "Four D's: Dreams, Decency, Dignity, and Diligence." We have to teach our students the meanings of these words in their lives because usually no one has. This year I did dignity, and I talked a lot about common niceties such as saying thank you when someone holds a door open for you or goes out of their way for you in some way.

Yes, we had to teach them that. It's a sad world we live in.

Yesterday, I was talking to a colleague that I had never met who had been assigned to coordinate a current events/government seminar with me for students at a university. After some lengthy rambling, he did put forth a couple of good ideas and agreed to do the power point for the beginning of the session. Since he was a government teacher and had more knowledge than I do on the basics of government, this took a lot of pressure off of me. All I had to do was coordinate the roundtable discussions following the power point.

So, before getting off the phone with him, I said "Thanks for your help, I appreciate it."

To which he replied, "Well, I didn't do anything, but ok."

Huh???

Well I respectfully disagree. Yes, you did do something: You director assigned you to help coordinate an event you knew nothing about with a person from a different city that you had never met. You spent time working with her and coming up with ideas and then agreed to put in the work for a large part of the presentation.

Yes, you did something. And yes, you deserved to be thanked.

And if you can't accept being thanked than keep it to yourself. You are not my subordinate and I do not have the power to boss you around, therefore you are acting upon your own will to make this task much easier on me, whether you intended to or not.

And frankly, I find it most ungracious that you refuse to accept my thanks and I will remember that every time I see you.

You want to know what I think? I think people who don't say thank you, are unappreciative and ungrateful. I think they have issues. Not saying thank you is very close to being entitled. And entitlement is an even nastier thing.

So I'm going to say thank you to people whether they like it or not.


I think people who can't accept thank you from others have some sort of superiority complex.

Do you know someone who never says thank you?

Have you ever been mad at someone for saying thank you?


And that's my rant for the day.


Thank you for reading. :)