So at work, the mailroom guy comes up to me and goes " Ive been meaning to ask you a question... I saw you the other day and you look like you've lost a lot of weight. Have you?" Me: "uh... yeah". Him: I thought so. Coz you used to be really big! YOu've lost sooo much weight now! How long did it take you to lose all that weight?" Me: I dont know. a few months. Him" Yeah because you used to be so big! I just cant believe how much weight you lost".
I wanted to kill him! I am sure he thought he was giving me a compliment but all he did was to make me feel awful!
Your Thread header says it all! People are stupid! I would say guys, but I know there are plenty of women (some of my family members among them) Who would, and have said much worse!
It is so stupid, all you can do is laugh!
OK, foot in mouth disease but he meant to be kind. The one I'm getting a lot at the moment is:
You've lost weight.
Yes, I have.
You've lost a Lot of weight.
Thankyou for noticing.
You're looking very good, it suits you.
Thankyou.
Keep up the good work.....
(Smiles enigmatically).
Again, they mean to be kind but the bit at the end just reminds me that I'm far off slim still!
Ugh, I hate the "you'll look sick" comments. I told my mom my goal was 125, and she told me I would look sick at 125. I went off on her about how 125 was a healthy weight for my height. It's actually in the higher end of the normal weight range! I think I'd look GREAT and that's all that matters.
I think sometimes we are too sensitive. Not everyone is going to word things in the perfect way for us. He probably could have been more sensitive but I think I would rather hear that from someone than having nobody say anything at all to let me know they see a change.
Ummmm .... I think it's safe to say that with those kind of interpersonal skills & with that display of diplomacy & tact, he's not going to make it out of the mail room & into a management training program any time soon.
You gave me a flashback to my earlier successful (though unhealthy) weight loss efforts. Now you have to remember that this was before the whole Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas thing, and in a small city & a conservative, white shoe law firm whose on-the-job sexual harassment rules were made in the Pleistocene era. A mail room guy (do you see the pattern here?) told me I'd been better-looking before my weight loss "because you used to have the best cleavage, and now it's all gone, there's nothing left at all."
That left some scarring, yeah -- as you can see, because I can still recount it here, word for word, over a decade later -- but hey, I ended up in a better job, making four times what I earned back then, and that guy got canned from the mail room less than eight months after making that remark on (guess what?) sexual harassment charges. He was bothering someone else, and unlike me, she complained to management.
Hold your head up high, revel in your accomplishment & the changes you've been able to make, and leave that idiot behind in the dust.
I honestly think there are just too many people in the world that don't know how to compliment someone. Take it for what it was worth, someone noticing who you are not who you were and remember it's who you are now that counts. I fully own the fact that I was big at one time. I was. If I deny that I could end up going back there.
Oh, dear. I laughed out loud at some of these posts. What were those people thinking, and why did they speak those thoughts aloud!?
Don't let a rotten "compliment" get you down. One of two things is the undoubted outcome of such a comment: one, the offender realizes their gaffe later and spends time mentally kicking himself/herself for being a boor; or two, they continue blithely unaware of their woeful social skills until someone socks 'em in the jaw (literally or figuratively) for saying something inappropriate.
Either way, sometimes it's best to accept a verbal gift in the spirit in which it was intended rather than the atrociously mangled way it came out.
That's not a compliment you loser!
thats exactly the same for me!
