WYSIWYG, an acronym popular at the turn of the century

I was brought up (if not actually born) to believe
that what you see is what you get.  I thought
that people with friendly faces were 'nice people'.

I thought that people meant what they said
(allowing for exaggeration) because I did so.

I am still trapped in this mind-set and cannot
'read' faces, except (often) those of dogs. 
In my culture,
when people were asked the banal and bovine
question How are you ? or How's it going ? 

they replied Not so bad, not so bad,
even when they were ill, in pain,
half-blind with migraine or terminally sad.
They never said they were fine.