Three Misunderstandings
/Hello everyone! Feel free to scroll past this intro if you want to get straight into the misunderstandings.
This week at work a colleague had a delightful phone-based misunderstanding (more on this later), and last week my boyfriend and I had a delightful cheese-based misunderstanding (also more on this later), and the week before that my friend told me about the time she had a hilarious toilet-based misunderstanding, and basically this post wrote itself.
Side note: I am doing a Content Marketing Course* and it gave many good examples of Introductions To Topic-Based Posts and oh boy do I do none of them. If you like, you can imagine that introduction said:
“Misunderstandings happen every day! Whether it’s business or personal, everybody has a story about the time they got the wrong idea. Here are three of mine.”
And that would probably be a better introduction.
---
*no, I don’t really know either, but then I haven’t finished the course yet. I think I am supposed to be Repurposing This Content but I’m fucked if I can think of another Purpose for it. Who wants to register for a webinar about the time I bought the wrong cheese for years? Rhetorical question. Don’t ask those, they’re terrible for engagement.
Anyway, like and subscribe!
(Deeply cynical face emoji.)
---
Three Misunderstandings
1. In Which the Client is a Good Boy
Earlier this week my colleague made a phone call to a customer called Hunter; the phone was answered by someone else, and so my colleague asked if she could speak to Hunter.
Unbeknownst to my colleague, she had called a wrong number. But the woman who answered the phone had a dog… called Hunter.
Immense confusion ensued.
Colleague: “I asked what his last name was and she said he didn’t have a last name! Then I found out he was a dog.”
I gather she did not get to speak to Hunter.
THIS IS NOT HUNTER. THIS IS ROLAND. I PROMISE THIS ENTIRE STORY WASN’T A CHEAP EXCUSE TO POST A PICTURE OF ROLAND BUT… LOOK AT HIM. MAY I SPEAK TO ROLAND PLEASE
2. Cheese Purchasing
This is a nice story about how compromise is important in relationships, and so is communication. It will very soon become apparent which one I didn’t do.
I discovered fairly early on in my relationship with SJ that his favourite cheese was the ineptly named ‘Tasty’.* It’s not my favourite. Nothing against it as a cheese (it’s hands down the best cheese for a cheese sauce), but it’s not the cheese I’d choose.
However, since I found out it was SJ’s Best Cheese, every time I’ve been to the supermarket I’ve selflessly purchased Tasty, because I don’t mind Tasty, and SJ is good, and I would like for him to have the cheese he chose.
Then we found out last week that SJ had been doing exactly the same thing.
Tasty is neither of our favourite cheese and we’ve both been buying it religiously, safe in the kowledge that it is the preferred cheese of our beloved, for nearly two years and we have no idea how this happened.
I have tried to work this back like the cheese detective I am, and I think early on SJ made a casual comment about liking Tasty, and then I bought a block (thus cementing my preference in his mind), and I guess it went on from there? Regardless of how we got here, finally, we are free to buy the Edam we have been craving for so long.
Then about two days later we repeated the entire process with Indian food Our thought process was: “My cool boy/girlfriend doesn’t like spicy food, so I’ll order one mild curry so they are happy, and one medium so that I too am happy, without making my cool boy/girlfriend Vindaloo Sad.”
WE BOTH LIKE HOT FOOD WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US.
---
*re: Tasty Cheese – imagine if more foods were named like this. “We have many apples, which would you like? Royal Gala? Granny Smith? Jazz?** Red Delicious?” WAIT. I started this footnote to talk about how bizarre the naming convention is that gave rise to Tasty Cheese but now I see it’s everywhere. Red Delicious my backside. How dare you be so presumptuous, apple and cheese namers.
“What sort of banana is that? “Fuckin’ good banana.” “…” “No, that’s what it is called.”
**the uncommon footnote-within-a-footnote has been invoked because Jazz is an even weirder name than Tasty. Am I supposed to noodle aimlessly on my saxophone while eating this apple? Is this the apple favoured by Frank Sinatra? Is it called this because I’m simply so ‘jazzed’ about eating an apple? Nobody is that ‘jazzed’ (I refuse to dignify it as a real word by removing its quotation marks) about eating an apple. Does this apple in some way embody the very spirit of jazz? But it doesn’t smell even slightly of cocaine.
JAZZ APPLE? BUT I’VE BEEN HERE HALF AN HOUR AND YOU HAVEN’T TOLD ME ONCE ABOUT YOUR ACID-INFLUENCED POST-BASSOON FREE JAM.
Also, what about the many other music styles out there? Where is my Baroque Banana? My Thrash Metal Pumpkin? My Trance Boysenberry? My Scat Canteloupe? Get out of here with your musical fruitnames.
---
3. A Tale of One Toilet
This story comes to you courtesy of my friend The Teacher, and her adventures in Japan. She is a Kiwi lass (the country, not the fruit. Where is my Dubstep Kiwi? Sorry, still kind of on that musical fruit tangent) who lived in Japan for a few years while teaching English.
While in Toyko, TT went out for dinner with a colleague and a couple of local friends, to a traditional restaurant street which was lined with tiny eateries. Most of these seated a maximum of 15 people at one time, and the restaurant TT ended up in seated a maximum of 8 customers, all of whom packed onto one long table with bench seats either side. This all sounds terrible to me but I gather she quite liked it.
GOOGLE SAYS IT LOOKS LIKE THIS BUT IMAGINE WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU LIKE, GOOGLE’S NOT THE BOSS OF YOU
Anyway, it turns out that traditional ‘restaurant streets’ don’t have individual toilets in the restaurants; instead there is one Toilet For All which sits at the end of the street, and which each restaurant sends its patrons to should the need arise. (This becomes relevant later. It’s quite an interesting fact though, isn’t it? I was thinking about this, and the closest we come in NZ is probably the good old campground loo block – which, while full of delightfully unexpected spiders and heartland concrete-block charm, is not quite the same).
If anyone in the restaurant wanted to go to the Toilet For All, everyone else had to stand up and let them out – not unlike when you realise you need the loo halfway through a movie and back awkwardly out while whispering “sorry sorry sorry” and bumping into people’s knees. As you can imagine, the frequency of this increased as the night went on and more drinks were drunk.
TT and her friends had happily settled into this tiny restaurant for an evening of dinner and drinking when eventually, inevitably, the time came for TT to make her way to The Toilet For All. After unseating her fellow diners she toddled down to the toilet and there she found two impeccably dressed, elegant Japanese women standing outside.
She nodded to them and went to open the door to the toilet, when they stopped her and asked her seriously and knowingly, "Poo?"
At which TT thought, good grief! How rude! Do they particularly need to know?
So TT tried to politely sidle past, but the ladies kept repeating "Poo? Poo?" and finally TT said “NO! Just wee!” and then one of the ladies, in a fit of sudden high-school-English recollection, said triumphantly, "You need poo!"
Well, TT was offended, and was about to explain quite clearly that a poo was not what she needed when one of her local dining compatriots came dashing out of the restaurant holding something aloft.
A keychain! Featuring a small figurine of Winnie-The-Pooh.
As it turns out, each restaurant in the street has a key to the shared toilets, which patrons have to take with them when they go – and the restaurant TT was at had a key distinguished by a Winnie-The-Pooh keychain… who is, if you didn’t know, just referred to in Japan as ‘Pooh’.
(TT notes that this is the night the cherry blossom first appeared in Japan, and she thinks saw it flowering outside the toilet, but she couldn’t be sure if it was because she was so flustered about all the Pooh.)
---
And that is the end of the Three Misunderstandings.
I am off to buy some cheese.