The viral Greggs sign. What was that all about?
The sad story in her own words
I was going to call this a fun one but that doesn’t feel right given the conclusions I’ll come to. For those outside the UK, Greggs is a takeaway snack food store which is an institution and gets a lot of attention.
I urge you to read the full story here first. Given I’m going to say personal things about the person making the comments and other people in her life, then I’m not going to name her here.
Here are her words in full:
I saw the sign outside Greggs and thought it was a bit inappropriate.
I was on my day off and I was just in town. I went to go get some lunch.
I just thought if I was that manager, or a family member of that manager, and I saw that sign, it's quite passive aggressive.
When someone gets sick, people don’t do it for no reason. People go to work to do a good job, and no one takes a sick day lightly.
I tried to put myself in the position of if this was my partner or my child, or someone in my family.
If someone I knew was at home really poorly, with an underlying condition or mental health condition, and they were really unwell, I'd be devastated.
I'd struggle to see that.
We're in a situation at the moment where I think communities need to be more understanding of one another, more appreciative of one another.
It's a bit tone deaf. It's not appropriate.
The important thing to highlight is we need to be more understanding of one another at the moment,
Someone commented saying you need to understand the pressures people are under - I get it.
A simple 'we're closing at 2pm today - sorry for the inconvenience' would have been fine. It doesn't need that detail about somebody and what they're going through.
Let’s break it down
As a twist I’m going to start with my conclusion and then show how I got there.
Let’s call her Jill.
Jill isn’t having a happy time in her life at the moment. I suggest that she has low self esteem and feels like she isn’t being listened to or appreciated which see feels is unjust. Certain people around Jill are causing her issues right now.
How did I get there?
Firstly, Jill’s presentation of the story is weak.
I was on my day off and I was just in town. I went to go get some lunch.
So much of this is not needed. Yes, the story needs a set up but we don’t need to know it was her day off, we don’t need to know she was in town, just she had gone to get lunch.
The way she minimises words here made me think she has self-esteem issues “just in town” , “some lunch”. Someone with more confidence would state something along the lines of “I was enjoying my day off, I was in town and went to get lunch”.
Hold the low self-esteem thought, it keeps coming up. Back to weakness in her presentation
She starts by saying the sign was “a bit inappropriate”, nearer the end it was “not appropriate”. She can say the sign was a bit of something and that it wasn’t something. She doesn’t commit to what she things the sign is. This indicates her feelings about the sign aren’t that strong, that she’s using the sign as a springboard to make a different point.
I just thought if I was that manager, or a family member of that manager, and I saw that sign, it's quite passive aggressive.
If she thinks the sign is passive aggressive, then the sign is passive aggressive. Her reason as explained here makes no sense. She is saying that it only becomes passive aggressive if it’s seen by the manager or his family. That just doesn’t hold.
No ownership
From here Jill takes no ownership of how the sign makes her feel personally, she goes to great lengths to show how it could make other people feel.
She is worried if a family member of the sick manager saw it.
Then she tries to put herself in a space where the sign was about a member of her family or a friend.
Finally she says if the sign was aimed at someone she knew she’d be devastated.
If the sign has the ability to offend then the person most able to take offence would the the manager who is the target of the sign. Jill shows scant concern about the manager and is much more focussed on people she knows or is related to.
Possibly connected, Jill doesn’t tell us how she would feel personally either. She only says she would be offended on behalf of other people. Again this points to low self esteem.
When Jill says
When someone gets sick, people don’t do it for no reason. People go to work to do a good job, and no one takes a sick day lightly.
Once again she doesn’t place herself in the narrative, it’s just what “someone” does when they are sick.
More understanding
Jill then talks about a need for understanding and it reads like a cry for help.
I often look for repeated words to see what is important to people and Jill uses understanding or understand a lot. I needn’t have bothered looking, she says it explicitly herself
The important thing to highlight is we need to be more understanding of one another at the moment.
I her own words, Jill is looking for understanding.
Her appeal for more understanding, a first glance, feels like an appeal to society in general. But she is very specific three times that she wants more understanding of “one another”, that is, on a personal level.
There’s no hard indicator of who it is that Jill wants more understanding from in her life but she mentions the concept of family twice so an issue could be there.
There are indicators that Jill might not be as understanding as she hopes others are. She shared this on social media, apparently unconcerned about the effects this could have on the employees who put up the sign.
She shows nowhere that she is open to the possibility that the shop staff and manager have a warm and supportive relationship and that the sign was in a style they all approved of and laughed at.
And she used the phrase “tone deaf” to describe the sign. This is an offensive term. It is using a disability to describe something in a negative way. It’s offensive in the same way as saying a clumsy person is a “spastic”.
Again, these are indicators that the sign was a springboard Jill was using to hit different goals.
I suspect this was posted by Jill in an effort to boost her self esteem. I hope she finds more fruitful ways of dealing with her issues with herself and others.
I hope this shows that some of the tools i use here can be useful away from true crime and celebrity confessions. Looking at the words people use can you understand what is going on with them and maybe even help you help them.