A Compliment Gone Wrong

The day before yesterday, my company organized a Technical Symposium. Basically this was a platform for us engineers to present our findings and achievements to fellow colleagues and bring them to the attention of our top directors.

Now, there was one remarkable innovation by the Failure Analysis team, in which they improvised on a technique to remove silicon material from a surface.

Now, I'm always a person to give credit where credit is due. And I noticed the speakers were not bringing enough attention to this innovative technique. I decided I had to complement them in the form of a disguised question at the end of their speech.

I waited until they finished, then raised my hand.

"Thank you, (Name) and (Name). I would like to clarify something," and started my question:

"That ingenious idea you presented, is it unique to our company?"

I hoped that this question would prompt them to speak again on their brilliant idea, and bring the focus on this innovative technique. However, what happened next was out of my expectation!

As soon as I said the final word, both speakers bolted stiff into defensive mode and one of them started replying immediately.

One said: "Yes yes, we need it very much. This is because..." and launched once again into explaining how the clever method works, which was already clear to me! I was trying to praise you for that, for god's sake!

After her lengthy explanation, her colleague supported by saying, "Yes, we need it very much!"

I soon realized that they had misheard my question -- "Is it unique to our company?" -- as the (slang and grammatically-incorrect-but-a-popular-Malaysian-usage) mangled English form of "Is it you need to our company?"

I had to repeat my question, and the audience was squirming with awkwardness and forced chuckles.

The embarrassment was mutual. But all in, what a pity that my subtle attempt to praise those good engineers in front of our top directors backfired to such an extent.

Really, it could have been great. What a pity really.