Is It Still A Compliment If You Don’t Agree?

I don’t remember the majority of the compliments I’ve received. So, without including the empty platitudes like “You’re pretty” or my favorite, “You’re a classic beauty.” Or, the time I took offense to when my boss called me “smart,” I’d have to go with the time a coworker called me a “savant,” because it’s the only compliment I’ve ever gotten that was different and memorable.

It was a video tech job, as usual, and at the time I didn’t care about my appearance. I didn’t come to work looking like a slob, but I wasn’t putting much effort into it either. So there were lots of days where my shoestrings came undone, and I left them that way. All day. At work. Boss over there, didn’t care. I walked around the office with my shoestrings untied.

I was knowledgeable about my job, as I was supposed to be, as well as computers. And one day, one of my coworkers walked up to me, we chit-chatted for a little bit, and then he looks down at my untied shoe strings and says, “You’re a savant”. And then he walked away back to his desk.

Now, first off I don’t consider myself anywhere near a savant. I get bouts of malaise a lot and I make the dumbest choices when it comes to life. Or as one of my friends called me “I’m so cavalier about everything.” When I think of a savant, I think of people like Einstein who yeah, they’re disheveled, but they also go in hard on fields of research. That’s not me. While I definitely have a high interest in tech, I’m just your average Jane with a bad case of procrastination that sabotages everything I try to do.

Although I appreciate his compliment of being called a savant, I really don’t feel like I even hold a candle to those proven that are.