Laurel van der Toorn

How busy could you be and not take that one minute to just say, congratulations, David, happy birthday.

That's all you got to do.

Takes 20 seconds.

And you couldn't do that.

So that's the way the employees see.

No, when people say I'm too busy, I had too much going on.

It's like, no, no, that's not exactly what happened.

You just didn't prioritize it and be honest about that.

So I suppose it's perceived a lot different than these employers intended.

Right.

And I think that is the lesson for us, you know, is to put yourself, if you're a manager, in the shoes of your subordinates or in any kind of relationship with power like this.

Put yourself in their shoes and they know they're supposed to get this card and they know the policy and they know part of it is about trying to build a little rapport between the boss and the employee.

And they can't even do that.

And if you look at it that way, then it's maybe not quite so surprising, right?

What could be some other things that we could put in this bucket of workplace slights?

Like I go to the coffee machine and grab three coffees.

I've got four coworkers.

Well, you know, I started to look into this and the literature on this surprisingly goes back to Aristotle, who is not talking about being in line for coffee, but he was talking about the idea about insults.

What is really an insult?

Wow.