The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out:

During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort.

But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place, and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway:

“I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.”

We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holidays our daughter is used to and expects demands. We should cite her self-certification as a “luxury person” as evidence that her life, as compared to her friends’ lives, isn’t all bad. After all, unlike Calvin’s dad, we’re not good at real-time retorts to such complaints from the kid.