Why is everyone suddenly saying this?
In front of me stands a girl with a high ponytail, balancing a tray on her left hand and holding a small box in her right hand to send the order to the bar. ‘I'll have a double espresso, please,’ I say. And deep down, I already know what she's going to say. Those two words that everyone nowadays confirms everything with. ‘Absolutely fine.’
The two words
There's nothing wrong with it, you would think. But they are exactly the two words that make me a little rebellious. Because what could possibly be wrong with my order of a double espresso? My choice for a double espresso? The fact that I'm ordering one at all? I just get so many questions from this reaction. The point is that I walk around all day with a lot of questions, because the whole world says it.
Yesterday, my elderly DHL delivery person even dared to say ‘absolutely fine’ when he brought a package. I said: ‘Thank you,‘ he said: ’Absolutely fine.‘ There I stood in the doorway wondering what could possibly be wrong with this situation. After all, delivering is his profession. And the disturbing thing about all this is that it's no longer just the young ponytails who constantly shout ’absolutely fine‘, we've reached the stage where parents are taking over. Before you know it, great-grandparents will be shouting that something is ’absolutely fine‘. Don't get me wrong, something can of course be ’absolutely fine'. Take a mathematical formula; it's particularly handy if you have it 100 percent correct.
Another thing
If you think this is the only thing: of course not. Suddenly everyone thinks everything is also 100 percent. ‘For sure,’ they say, followed by: ‘100 percent.’ If you are sure about something, then I actually assume for convenience that this is already 100 percent in itself. You don't necessarily have to calculate this for me again in percentages. Everything less than 100 percent I often find a bit half-hearted.
Am I done now? No, because suddenly everything is also fun. And that can't be right. Sometimes the world is just less fun. The problem with liking everything is that the word loses its power. Just watch, in a year the word ‘fun’ will have the weight of the word ‘fine’ or ‘good’, and that's not fun at all.
But yesterday I suddenly heard a very refreshing little word. I was having a plate with my best friend and her six-year-old son exuberantly sprinkled the word ‘sjesis’. If something was good, if something was less good, or just as a filler. That was 100 percent fun among all those same statements, I hereby count it as absolutely fine.
