In the last few weeks, I was wondering what to write here. My first thought was to write about all the travel I've done in the US in the last 23 months. However, that would need quite some preparation and collection of pictures. While I prepare for the travel stories, I felt I should start writing something and that's when I remembered a strange and quite an embarrassing incident which happened a couple of months ago. Hold on! I still am not sure who got embarrassed with it. However, I just want to narrate the incident from my perspective and am not intending to find out any answers for anything. If for any reason someone relates it to themselves or someone they know, it may not be a coincidence. It is just my honest opinion..!
Lets get to the point. A good friend of mine, let me call this friend as Patricia had been to Europe for a conference of a renowned pharmaceutical company and I was very happy for that.
Well, lets get back to get a background, Patricia studied medicine and was a highly energetic, knowledgable and a real fun person to be with. We were good friends and always had many things to discuss in common. I, being an engineer in electronics and interested in medical electronics had many things to know from Patricia and vice-versa. We always shared these common talks and enjoyed it. Well, at least I definitely enjoyed it.
Lets get back to the Europe conference. I was really very happy that she successfully toured Europe and learnt a lot of new things and was keen to know how it went after seeings some posts on Facebook. I did post a comment on one of those posts, which I think read something like "Is there a blogpost or something to know more about what all you learnt and how your entire trip was?". I knew that she had a blog which she was using for a few other things. She was a great artist too. She painted on pots (I have one of those at home as a gift) and made ear rings for girls from paper. She of course was a multi talented and I appreciated her artwork. She used to blog about her art and my expectation was that she would blog about her trip too. My comment was to know if there was a post which I could read. I got back to my work after this.
It wasn't too long before I noticed a notification on my phone that there was a reply to comment on this post. I was quite free this day and was quick on check this reply which read something like "why don't I come to your home and give you a session" (may not be exact words, but meant pretty much the same). My first and only impression reading that was she is just making fun and being jovial. So, I responded saying "Well, I don't mind if you are booking your flights to US for this. I will be happy to host you at my home." (Again, may not be exact words.) This was again just for fun and an invitation to visit US.
This time, even before I could close Facebook window, I get a ping on messenger from Patricia saying that I was being rude. I did not understand what was rude. Anyways, I just laughed and asked her how she was. She said she was that sorry if her posts hurt me. Again, I did not understand what she saying. The next thing I said was that I'll take the comments off and was sorry if she felt it offensive. At this point of time, I felt a little embarrassed myself and did not want to take this any further. Rather than embarrassing someone I felt its better I keep myself confused and a little embarrassed. All that I could understand from the conversation is, some friends asked her if I was her enemy and she got offended of my post because of that.
Thinking of this, I did not understand whether my comment offended this person or some one else asking about my comment. Having had such good regards and respect, I was very surprised by this response and had never expected it from Patricia. Was this a change in the thinking of Patricia over a period of time, or the influence of others, or the whole idea of this being public (impact of social media).
Whatever was the reason, I learnt something from all this. "Check what you post on someone else's personal page." Human behavior/response is something very unpredictable. Even when you are at your best of being genuine and just being funny, you can get pretty unexpected responses.
At the end of the day, you just have to forget it and move on!!
"Everything seems rather absurd one or the other day and you'll laugh about it."
