It may be that the recipient knows how bad you may think it to be, but has a set of comparators of such sheer awfulness that s/he reckons whatever you gave them has to be better. Or knows how much worse they would have performed themselves. Or is simply too tired to do anything other than the Very Polite Thing.
Rebecca West, in the book of hers I touted a while back, wrote that the tragedy of the scientist was that all jobs, and particularly experiments done to high degrees of skill and exactitude, were to some extent botched but that they could not, by the limits of their profession, take pride in a botched job, and that the tragedy of builders was that they *had* to take pride in botched jobs because all building work inevitably had snags and the buildings would have to be occupied nonetheless.
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Date: 2007-04-30 04:20 pm (UTC)Rebecca West, in the book of hers I touted a while back, wrote that the tragedy of the scientist was that all jobs, and particularly experiments done to high degrees of skill and exactitude, were to some extent botched but that they could not, by the limits of their profession, take pride in a botched job, and that the tragedy of builders was that they *had* to take pride in botched jobs because all building work inevitably had snags and the buildings would have to be occupied nonetheless.
We live in an intractable world.
And so say all of us.