Excruciatingly awkward misunderstandings

[kpnutts]

So It’s late at night when your brain reminds you of those awkward moments from your past...

Back at my first year at university it was a girl in my halls birthday and she was having a gathering of about 30ish people in one of the communal kitchens and I knew say about 5 of them. I arrived and had a few drinks, the music is playing loud and at some point noticed a girl on her own in the corner who happened to wearing a jacket I also owned.

So to make conversation I said something along the lines of “nice jacket, I have the same one”. I realise now she must have completely misheard me and she gave me a very odd look and said “err yes it’s mine”. A bit confused by the response I said “oh I just meant I have the same one, it’s from Zara right?”. Backing away slightly she laughed nervously and replied “haha no no it’s definitely mine, I don’t know Zara”. It’s pretty awkward now so I try to explain I meant Zara ‘the shop’, it doesn’t matter, let’s talk about something else, but she’s only getting more confused.

Suddenly her tone changes, she smiles at me sweetly and slowly says “ohhh I don’t know ‘Zara de-shop’ she must be your friend, is she looking after you tonight?”. In my awkward 18 year old way of trying not to embarrass her and the ridiculousness of the situation I stupidly grin as I think of a way to extract myself from the conversation. She takes this as a yes and continues “Isn’t it great you have such inclusive friends, are you living here by yourself?”. Arghh, feeling too far down the line to correct her and fearing someone I know may overhear, I quickly excuse myself to the bathroom and scuttle back to my room. None of my hall friends ever mentioned it and I never saw the girl again!

It plays over in my mind every now and again how a simple mishearing resulted in someone thinking I had a learning disability and talking to me like a child! She was (admittedly inadvertently) incredibly patronising even so, although I’m sure her intentions were good.

I do wonder if at some point in the next few years she walked past Zara and the penny dropped! I do giggle at the thought of her in a shopping centre having a complete Oh. My. God. moment.

Tell me mumsnet, have you ever had similar awkward miss understanding, or maybe you had a weird conversation about Zara many years ago.

An elderly Catholic priest offered me his cheek at a Christmas party at their residence in our closwle. I was a bit surprised, but what the hell, it was a time of peace and good will to all, and I'd had a sherry. As my lips puckered and made contact with his skin, I realised that he was a little deaf and he'd been leaning in to hear me more clearly. Still, he didn't complain.

8 driving tests I took, and never did pass. The following story might give you an indication as to why:

I was on a driving lesson probably my fucking 500th and we were caught in traffic. The instructor asked me to 'stick my nose out, and see what the hold up was'.
I was slightly perplexed, but rolled down the window and actually stuck my nose out Not even my head, but my nose. He of course had meant the nose of the car ...

And don't even start me on the instructor yup, I had a few who advised me to practise steering wheel turns with a dinner plate at home Ex husband I'm sure my disastrous driving and the near bankruptcy from all the lessons contributed to that nearly died laughing when he saw me do that.
I'm a bit of a special case when it comes to the old driving ...

savehalloween that's my favourite so far!! The perfect mix of hilarious and something I would have definitely said

My friend’s instructor told her to go over the roundabout. “Over?” she queried and he confirmed yes, over the roundabout.
So she took it literally and drove right across the grass in the middle.

A colleague, Rachel, was buying a house and her solicitor was being really useless in closing the sale.

She had made several calls that morning to the solicitor, Jane Murray, but she was never available. Friend was really p'd off and was telling us all about the woes of dealing with this Jane Murray.

As Rachel was packing up her desk at the end of the day, her phone rings and she picks it up and in her best telephone lilting voice says 'Good afternoon, Jane Murray speaking' !

We are all looking at her, totally bemused, she turns bright red and says 'Oh hello Jane , I was just speaking about you !!' The whole office fell around the place in hysterics, and we still laugh about it to this day. She was totally mortified and still cringes when she thinks about it. God only knows what Jane Murray thought about it !

living on the north of England and being Scottish I went to McDonald's one day for breakfast.
i asked for pepper and hot a strange look. told to wait and someone would get some.
I got handed a sheet of lined A4
i

Not me but an ex had just got into clubbing and recreational drugs. At a club, someone he knew vaguely gave him a wrap of coke to take to the toilets. Ex went and managed to put the whole lot up his nose, first time he's ever had it, throwing the empty wrap away, not realising that the etiquette is to take a line and give the rest back. He was mortified when he found out what he'd done.

I had the estate agent round (he was rather posh)and we where having coffee chatting about putting house on market etc then all of a sudden my 3 year old ran in the kitchen with my massive dildo ther I had won at an Ann summers party and it had been in the box under my bed.
He was waving it around Like an aeroplane saying mummy whats this !! I am still cringing today 10 years later.

When I was 16 I worked for a football club selling the match day tickets. Got to know lots of the regulars, one of which was a guy in his mid 20s who was friends with my friends sister. He was a singer and friends sister let us hear his music which was great. Few weeks later I sell him his ticket and said "oh I heard YOUR single". He looks at me in complete disgust, telling me he has a fiance and 2 kids, how he wouldnt risk going to jail due to a child coming on to him. I was absolutely mortified and sheepishly told him I meant his music single. He walked away pissing himself laughing.
That was 18 years ago, I still occasionally see him around our town...he just gives me a chuckle and a wave.

@Joodleoodle I'm another one that would like the donkey joke explained

When I was 16 I got a summer job in a factory working on a production line. We were all new trainees and got lots of instructions from the supervisors as we got up to speed and upped our targets.

If your section was caught up and you were waiting for more components to arrive you’d get up and do other jobs like making up boxes or bagging up rubbish.

One of the guys who brought the parts was collecting the rubbish and asked “Who doesn’t know how to tie up a bin bag then?” I jumped up quickly and went over to him and said earnestly “Oh yes, that’s me!” mistakenly thinking he was going to show me some special technique to tie the bags up, rather than lamenting the fact that someone couldn’t do this simple task!

He looked at me like I was a total idiot (which obviously I was) and then slowly and deliberately, with as much sarcasm as possible, took 20 seconds to show and explain to me how to tie up a bin bag.

I couldn’t have gone any redder from embarrassment, quietly thanked him and scuttled off back to my station.

Everybody on the line heard and I didn’t hear the end of it for days - factory humour can be pretty brutal!

At a previous job, we had some kind of public event and this woman came up to me and greeted me warmly by name. She starts chatting like 'Hi! How are you? Great to see you! I didn't realise you worked here' etc etc.

I knew it was someone I'd met before, I mean that was not only clear from the way she was talking to me but also her face was very familiar, but I just couldn't for the life of me think where I knew her from. I've done lots of different jobs and lived in lots of different places, and this was a city of relatively close networks, so it wasn't that uncommon for me to meet vague acquaintances unexpectedly.

So I’m standing there thinking, 'Well I guess I could do the whole fake thing of pretending I know who she is and asking leading questions until she says something that jogs my memory' but then I just thought 'You know what, screw that, it's stupid, why can't people just be honest with one another? We all forget names and faces from time to time, it's not rude if it's not deliberate , what's the big deal?'

So I take a deep breath, put on my biggest smile and say in my warmest, most apologetic voice, 'I'm really sorry, look, I know I know your face, but I'm SO sorry, I just can't place you' (smile, smile). And she goes rigid and says in a voice like ice, 'I'm married to [ex-boyfriend of mine]'. Of course then I recognised her instantly and was mortified! I actually knew her quite well, I'd been to their house several times for dinner, they'd been to parties of mine, etc!!

In my defence, it had been two or three years since I'd seen her, during which time I'd moved away and come back and they weren't in my social circle anymore. AND she'd completely changed her hairstyle & colour, and her style of dress, AND I had no reason to expect her to be there. But even so, it was awful! I started babbling like 'Oh my God, [her name], of course, how are you ha ha ha? How are [her husband, my ex] and the kids? Love your hair like that ha ha ha' but she made a swift exit and I've had no contact with either of them since (about 16 years)!!

Best most awkward of mine was whilst working in a part time job whilst at uni in Liverpool. Was talking to someone who worked there who basically started telling me their life story, including : 'I was in Kerr'.

Er, que?

I just have asked her 3 or 4 times where 'kerr' was when the penny finally dropped : she had been in care!!!!

God it was embarrassing

Another awful one.

I was in a supermarket queue and the lady in front of me was just finishing paying etc. There was a lad on the other side of the bag packing bit who had learning disabilities who I assumed was packing bags. So I smiled at him and passed him my bags. He gave me the oddest look and walked off, the lady kind of grimaced and shook her head.

Of course he was the lady's son and not some day release bag packer working there.

Which I then realised as the bloody ground swallowed me up.

This thread has kept me up late laughing away on my own. I don't get the donkey joke either.

Oh christ, this thread is amazing but it stirred a memory I'd really hoped to forget!

I was 18, fresh out of fucking up my a-levels, looking for a job while waiting to do my resits, but with an offer from a uni I was keen on, and after a little while of no success somehow my grandmother wrangled me an interview in my area of interest - a temp job in a nursery. I didn't ask how this happened or why she had apparently called them and talked me up, I was just happy to potentially have something to do for the 6 months or so until I, hopefully, went to uni. So I dutifully dressed up for the interview, got the bus to the nursery, was warmly welcomed by one of the senior staff.

She was lovely, she showed me around and I was suitably complimentary about their facilities, feeling confident. Then I sat a while with the other candidates, only a couple, young women like me, and I was called in eventually to a panel of the manager, the senior staff member who'd shown me around, and the owner, an older man (with an incredibly thick, long beard, not relevant but I want you to imagine it).

I sat in front of this panel as they quizzed me on my qualifications (not great, not awful) and experience (some months part-time in a nursery) and what I wanted in the future.

Eagerly I said, "Well, hopefully I'll be attending X University to pursue a career in childcare," expecting them to think oh good, she'll be good as a temp, she's committed.

Instead the manager said, "How... how will you work, if you're in X City?"

"Oh, I won't be going until September!"

At that moment the whole atmosphere changed. The bearded older man, who had been totally silent up til now, started to shake his head, muttering "waste of time, waste of time" and I realised... this wasn't a temp job, they wanted permanent staff.

I fled the room so fast I forgot my bag and the lovely lady who'd shown me around had to bring it to me as I wept outside, she was very kind and understanding but I was so humiliated, I cried the whole bus ride home. Thankfully I don't live anywhere near there now but when I visit my hometown I cringe every time I go past that nursery.

I think I've cracked the donkey joke - I think there might have been an autocorrect. Instead of "Eeyore", it should say "hee haw,"?

Ravenesque - I did something a little similar - was walking through Heathrow with the then-BF-now-DH, and heard a family loudly talking in German, in an agitated fashion. I turned my head to look at them as I walked past, and the man saw me looking and called "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" so I said "Nein" and kept walking. He must have thought I was a right cow to have known what he said, answered him in German and then refused to help!
(To be fair, my German wouldn't have been up to helping him, it was only to O level standard)

"Yes" replies Donkey "Eeyore, retire, he always calls me that"

Nope, still can't get it. Even if it's "hee haw", still makes no sense.

The donkey punchline should be “hee haw, hee haw, he always calls me that”, I reckon.

I was in London for work recently and a friend asked me to join them 'at their club' for dinner.

I am from a working-class Scottish background and am not familiar with private members' clubs, but I am fond of nice food, so I eagerly accepted.

After dinner and a few drinks, I needed to use the loo, but the place was so 'discreetly lit' that it was like wandering round with a blindfold on, and I quickly got lost.

Fortunately, I happened upon a young member of the waiting staff, so asked him to point me in the direction of the ladies. He then performed this weird gesture, which I can only describe as being like that of the Principal Girl in a production of Dick Whittington, slapping their thigh and extending an arm.

I assumed this was some kind of secret club thing and did what any normal person would do in such a situation, linking my arm firmly through theirs.

This poor young fella then had to steer me down a maze of corridors - all the time arm in arm were we - before depositing me at the door to the ladies, where we uncoupled and BOWED to each other. I don't know why we bowed. I will never know why we bowed.

After weeing, I hot-tailed it back to my mate and didn't go to the loo again all night, for fear that I might have to high-five somebody the next time or something.

Oh I GET IT! 'ee'aw, 'ee'aw, 'e always calls me that - yes!

During a horrible 'introduce yourself' session at my new job, we were paired up.
We had to chat about life etc and then the other person would tell the whole group about you (my idea of hell).

During his explanation, he told everyone I had 45 guinea pigs - I'd actually said 4 or 5.
Everyone started firing questions at me and I panicked, thinking it was weirder that I didn't know if I had 4 or 5, than it was to have 45. So I had to make up a load of answers to explain how I manage to look after 45 guinea pigs every day, where they live, how big my garden must be, etc etc.
For years I was known as the girl with 45 guinea pigs .

I have had so many of these (ancient) so I'll tell you the best...or worst Back through the mists of time to my early 20s, I was standing at the bus stop with a couple of other people on a dark, rainy winter morning going to work in the town centre, 5 miles away. A car, indicated and pulled up a bit further down the road and waited with the engine running. Everyone looked at each other and then (I thought) looked at me. I walked down the road, opened the car door and got in and closed the door -turning to see an elderly gentleman, who I'd never seen before, looking rather shocked! We both committed to this madness must be a British thing - he said "Where are you going?" "Town please" I replied. He drove me all the way to my work - mentioning his wife quite a few times (in terror probably!) Nobody mentioned how strange this was. I often wonder if he tells the same story about a mad woman carjacking him and what a lucky escape he had!

So I had to make up a load of answers to explain how I manage to look after 45 guinea pigs every day

. Brilliant