Saying good bye?

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I sometimes walk away from someone when I think we are finished and then they will call after me to say good bye, usually when I am already about 15 metres away. I cant understand why these people want to call after me after I am walking away and get my attention again, just to say good bye, which also leads me to wonder what benefit the NT's get from the 'good bye' or what it communicates to them?

It denotes the ending of the conversation. Walking away without a proper ending is seen as rude as it means that you didn't think them important enough to listen to.

Hmm, that is interesting I am confused as I had just spent time talking with and listening to them as part of the conversation and it is usually clear that the conversation has ended before I leave.

I too used to walk off without saying goodbye. Apparently it used to confuse people (my friend told me). I consciously don't do it as much now.
Calling goodbye after you may be an indication of annoyance/frustration by your friend

Why are they confused? Good point about the annoyance/frustration, I did not make that connection.

As my friend said:
-She didn't always know if I was going to come back or if I'd just gone home.
- sometimes people thought they'd inadvertently upset me and caused me to leave angry. They were then trying to work out what they'd said that had upset me.

"Good bye" in my language means "Be good" (roughly translated), I felt awkward saying that when I was younger, and I made my own farewell phrase composing of the word for "be", with the last part swapped with something else "for a while", so it ended up being "be for a while". Well, that sounds weird when translated, but "be" could also mean "bye" , so it actually means "bye for a while".

It has stuck with me until this day, and I might be delusional, but in my mind, I came up with this saying on my own. However, my whole family said it while growing up, and it must have spread to friends aswell, cause suddenly everyone I knew said it back to me like that.

My point is, if you are uncomfortable with "good bye", try something else. Farewell? Safe journey? Have fun? See ya? Talk later?

..I mean..what is a "good" bye? is it meant to wish them well until you next speak, or what does it actually mean?

You think the conversation finished, but maybe the other part does not think so. Many times I think the conversation is over and my husband is expecting for me to say something. If people think the conversation is going on and you just left, they might think you got angry at them for some reason. In that case, calling you to say "good bye" means they want to make sure everyting is allright between you. I think the best approach is to get use to give an ending to the conversation. Get use to say "good bye" and get a "good bye" (retroalimentation - the person got your message) in return.

It's a "stop codon" as we say in genetics.

I don't know why it's popular but I'm with the NTs on this one. Same with "hello" (a "start codon"). I don't like it when people don't do those procedures.

It's useful to have a procedure for parting because it gives the people concerned a chance to set up their next meeting, to offer to walk down the road together, to give them a hug, to wish them good luck with whatever they're up to next.

I must say I often leave work very quietly, but that's because I usually haven't been talking to anybody much, and also because I don't want to draw attention to the fact that I'm going.........don't want them controlling when I come and go, so the less they know, the better.

Haha. If I was a strand of DNA I would be cancer-causing. I always forget to use my "stop codons".

You're safe enough as long as you have no spot deletions.......unlike mutations, deletions can give rise to frame-shift errors which are generally fatal.

What I want to know is, how does anybody handle that difficult phase when you've said your goodbyes but for some reason you then find you can't part for a while, or your paths cross again wthin minutes? It seems rude to ignore them, but what do you say?

I'm having trouble with something similar. There's a guy in my Chemistry 1A lecture that I talk to and we say a few comments back and forth when the class ends but then I leave to go to the bathroom before we meet back up in lab (which is on the other side of the building) so I find myself leaving the "conversation" abruptly before I realize that I should probably say something like "see you in lab" or "see you in a minute" since we end up standing outside for a few minutes waiting for the lab room to open up.

I think a small acknowledgement if you cross paths again should suffice, like a smile and upward head nod in acknowledgement that you see and recognize the other person. Or you could just try a small joking comment in passing like "It's you again!" or "Small world!" or "We meet again!" or "Fancy meeting you here!". Just throwing things out there. I'm not very smooth with that stuff either.

I am NT. Normally, I would turn it into a joke lile "I'm stalking you!" or "We are on the same schdeule today" or something like that. With my co-worker, when we keep running into each other on our way out, it turns into a joke like "I promise, I'm leaving now" or something like that. You don't want to ignore the person and you don't have to say abye again, so it's best to just make a joke of the whole thing.

Hope that helps.

Yes a good one-liner ought to fix it.



So it is jokes.........it figures. Good way of breaking the tension. I did try "we can't go on meeting like this" once, but it went down like a lead balloon. I still think that one should have worked. Too familiar?

Hm... I think that should have worked unless there were some other factors involved. The hard part is that every situation is different and there are different factors that make some comments better than others. For example, if the person was in a bad mood that day or if the person actually thought that maybe you actually were following them for some reason (people make assumptions) then I could see it not going well.

I normally am trying to sense the right moment to say goodbye, don't find it so just walk away.