A reader writes:
I was reading one of your recent posts where you mentioned you don’t believe in forcing adults to apologize in a professional setting. I am on the same page with you about that, and it made me think of a similar type of experience I had once where I was on the receiving end of such an apology and I’m curious how you think I should have handled it.
I (male) had gone to a doctor’s office to have an extremely minor surgery done. Despite it being minor, it still required me getting disrobed down to my boxers and putting on a hospital gown. This medical facility was one of those setups where the patient rooms has entrances from the front, and each room has a door in the back that leads to the area where all the doctors and nurses work.
After the procedure, I was alone with the doctor (also male) in the room and we were talking while I changed back into my clothes. As I was doing so, the nurse (female, and the same one who had assisted in the procedure) came in the back door to drop off some paperwork and I instinctively stepped to the side to be out of view of the open door. It was very quick and I didn’t think much of it, since by that point I had both my boxers and t-shirt on. I may have let out a midwestern “ope,” but I didn’t say anything else about it otherwise. The nurse was in and out in just a matter of seconds.
After the discussion with the doctor was done and I was fully dressed, he asked me to wait a moment and disappeared to the back area. After a couple of minutes, he returned with the nurse, who looked ashamed and stumbled out an apology to me about opening the door so fast and leaving me “exposed.” I was caught off-guard about what was happening in the moment so I just said something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s no big deal, but thank you.”
I felt really weird about it afterwards. It was, at worst, a simple accident on her part, but at the end of the day the only people who would have seen me are a bunch of medical professionals who have seen lots of people in various states of undress so I wasn’t worried about it at all (especially since I was basically clothed anyway).
Is there a better way I could have handled this? Or is there something else I could have said to the nurse or the doctor to smooth this over better?
You handled it fine!
The doctor is the one who mishandled it.
He wasn’t wrong to be concerned about what happened; while you weren’t terribly bothered by it, someone else might have felt exposed or embarrassed. And I suspect they have protocols to make sure that doors aren’t opened while a patient might be in a vulnerable state, and the nurse may have violated those.
But the way for him to handle it was for him to acknowledge it with you — “I’m so sorry, you deserve privacy while you’re changing and we generally do X to ensure that; I will talk with our staff about being more careful of that” — and then talk with the nurse privately afterwards.
Because to whatever extent someone in your position might have appreciated an apology, it didn’t need to come from the nurse herself, just from someone with some standing there to say “I’m sorry, that shouldn’t have happened.” The doctor qualified.
Making a point of dragging her back in to apologize just made things awkward for both of you.
All that said, if you’re asking in general how to respond to an obviously forced apology, I think these principles work:
* If you really don’t think an apology was warranted, say that! “No need to apologize, it wasn’t a big deal at all. These things happen.”
* If you do think what happened was a big deal and you don’t want to downplay that: “I appreciate that, thank you for saying it.”
* If you think what happened was a big deal and they need to be doing something beyond apologizing: “I appreciate that. What I’d really like to see is…”
