Give Them My Best

One social nicety I’ve never really cared about giving or receiving is the “give them my best” message. Every so often someone will tell me that so-and-so gives me “their best” and I never have a response to that other than “okay, thanks.” I mean we don’t go around wishing people the worst; so it kind of goes with out saying that people generally want the best for others.

Sometimes someone will tell me to give this message of goodwill to another and I nod and say “okay”…but I’m lying; I don’t relay that message. No one knows one way or another if I give that message, and to me it’s an unnecessary message. It’s like getting a generic “thinking of you” card with a signature; there’s no personalization to the message, just a somewhat thoughtful yet bland gesture.

To me, this gesture of goodwill is a throwback to when people didn’t have direct means of communication (I’m thinking Laura Ingalls’ time when people lived miles apart). When people were unable to call others on the phone (let alone email), so having a third-party relay messages made more sense (because that actually would be the quickest way to give another their regards).

But now we do have many means of communication, so anyone can give anyone else “their best” without someone else (e.g. me) being in the middle of it. I’m not a message board to give and retrieve messages (and let’s be honest, I’m a terribly unreliable message board at that). So if you want to give someone your best, then go ahead and do it directly to that person and cut the middleman out.