I’ve been working full-time almost 17 years now. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of really good, really bad, and beyond egregious behavior. I’ve seen the suck-ups, the people who somehow manage to get by and barely do any work. I’ve seen people who have self-professed themselves to be a “dick” and manage to get away with being rude to almost everyone. I’ve seen people who are awful at their job who still manage to get promoted. I’ve also seen people who truly do go above and beyond get passed up for promotions — time and time again. But what I never really thought would happen is that someone this week would actually have the balls to go off at me for simply thanking them for something they did for my customer.

I’m on the customer success team at my company, which means I manage a book of business that includes a set number of customers. I interact cross functionally at my company with multiple teams, ranging from sales, renewals, solutions engineering, accounting, product, etc., to get my job done. In the last year, there’s been a solutions engineer who has been labeled aggressive, rude, demeaning, and even sexist by some. We’ve gotten along fine to okay most of the time, but I got caught off guard this week when I thanked him for taking care of a customer request in his realm this week, and the response was extremely unexpected.

He responded with, “Why are you thanking me for doing my job? [Insert task] is what SEs are responsible for. There’s no reason to thank me for doing my job.”

My gut reaction to this response was, “Wow, you are truly an asshole.” But my general thought was, Oh, my. You must have had some really awful life experiences to get angry at someone for simply thanking you for doing a single deed. Clearly, this guy has a lot of pent up anger that he is choosing to misdirect, and to someone who is expressing a sentiment that is called “GRATITUDE,” that he should be meeting with grace. He is a good example of someone who is sorely in need of seeing a therapist, but is unlikely to have any self awareness to actually pursue to help himself.

We’re really in a questionable work setting when we cannot even thank someone for doing someone without eliciting their uncalled for rage. Where do people get this idea that behavior like this is actually acceptable? I do not even want to know what his reaction would be if I actually tried to give him some constructive feedback. I’d likely get my head blown up — virtually.