IT IS RIGHT BUT YOU ARE WRONG
Perhaps you've heard this cliché - it's not what you say but how you say it that counts - a number of times but its reality has not dawned on you, learn from how I experienced it today. It was our occasional academic staff meeting today and I was assigned an additional role to the ones I have been doing with unbridled enthusiasm. I happily accepted it but forcefully rejected its schedule. That was my mistake! The director strongly berated the reasons I provided for rejecting the role and assigned it to another capable person in my department. To me, the reasons were right; to him I was wrong. They were right because they were about my expertise. I was wrong because I expressed them in the wrong way. It became obvious that it was in the wrong way when he sarcastically referred to me as the ' most intelligent person in the room.' As a pragmatician, I knew the implications of that remark. So I went to a superior colleague to help me tender my sincerest apology. The col