What’s the deal with “of course”?
On a July trip to the New England states, I noticed many people responding with these two words instead of “you’re welcome.” As in, “Thank you for checking me into my hotel room this evening,” to which the desk clerk responded, “Of course!” in place of the (to me) customary, “You’re welcome.”
I didn’t get it, so I googled it.
As with most cultural phenomena over the last, oh, 10 years or so, I must have missed when “you’re welcome” fell out of vogue. The New York Times Magazine covered the expression’s demise in 2015, and the Huffington Post addressed it in 2018. The consensus is that “you’re welcome” has a certain braggadocious swagger, that the person who says it is acknowledging that a “thank you” was deserved. “You’re welcome,” by this line of reasoning, is pompous.
Go figure.
To me, “of course” feels that way, like the person is waving off my sincere gratitude and saying that my judgment is skewed for even considering whatever they did for me to be a favor. Or that they were taught to say it in some corporate right-speak training seminar about how to deal with moronic customers.
Look, my small-talk is already in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and nobody on. Now I have to worry that my automatic response to “thank you” is uppity or snarky. Thanks for nothing, “of course.”
***
Based on the way our families responded, you would have thought we lay down with snakes, lions and roaring bears instead of merely cracking the windows, leaning the seats back and catching a couple hours of sleep.
Undoubtedly, rest stops figure in the urban legends of the automobile age as places where terrible occurrences, uh, occur after dark.
But to a tightwad like me, few things could be as frightening as checking into a hotel after 10 p.m., paying an inflated rate for the room (because of COVID, which has become the boogeyman/scapegoat for all higher prices this summer) and then leaving early the next morning. It’s like paying $150 each for the privilege of a shower. A rest stop was a thrifty alternative.
At some point in the night, my wife elbowed me to put the windows up (she was cold) and the people sleeping in the car next to us drove away loudly (says my wife, but it didn’t wake me). Otherwise, we slept like babies. Big, cranky babies, but still.
Oh, and the next morning, as I creeped along some desolate back road on my way to a Dunkin Donuts, a police officer pulled me over for allegedly going left of center.
As we waited for him to run my license and registration, my wife leaned over and whispered, “If you get a ticket, it’s going to wipe away all the money we saved by sleeping in the rest stop.”
Thanks, Captain Obvious.
Happy ending: He let me off with a warning and a wave. The moral? A rest-stop sleepover police-proofs a driver for at least half a day.
***
I qualify “victim” because I had a good book (“Survivor Song,” by Paul Tremblay) and good tunes. So the first canceled flight wasn’t so terrible, nor were the two delays on the second flight. It felt a little like a vacation in a big, noisy library.
I’ll admit that the second canceled flight, some eight hours later, annoyed me a little, but I had a nephew in nearby St. Pete Beach, who gave me a ride to his place, let me spend the night and ferried me back to the airport the next morning for a flight on Frontier.
I left a less-than-glowing review on Twitter, which led Spirit Airlines to contact me about how they could make up for the mess. But, really, I was probably one of the least inconvenienced wannabe flyers at the airport that day.
When I consider the opportunity to kick back all day reading and grooving, what I really should be saying to Spirit is, “Thank you.”
To which they should respond, “Of course.”
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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