Once upon a time I was working at Subway. A customer came in and started to order, but before he got far a police officer came in. The officer pointed to the customer, smiled, and made a “come here” gesture. Both men left the building, and I could see them talking outside. After a few minutes they both laughed, the officer left, and the customer came back inside. I looked at him quizzically, and he told me what happened.
There was a Little Caesar’s next to the Subway. The customer had ordered a pizza by phone, but he got there right after they closed. Looking in through the door, he saw a pizza on the counter, which he assumed was his. Now, ordinarily he probably would have thought, “it’s closed, I’ll go somewhere else.” But it looked like they’d just closed a few minutes ago, they’d already made his food, and all they needed was for him to pay for it. In his mind, where was the harm? So he knocked on the door.
A young employee poked her head out from the back room, surprised by his knock. Using exaggerated motions, she pointed to her left. The customer found out later that she was trying to indicate the sign with their hours. But he took it to mean, “Our front door is locked, come around to the back door for your pizza.” So he walked around the building and knocked on the back door. The employee saw him through the peephole and called the police. When she never came to the back door, the customer decided to get Subway instead, and that’s when the officer showed up.
Socially comfortable people are reading this and thinking, “Wait… how could ANYONE think the employee meant for him to go to the back door? It’s unsafe to be opening the doors for anyone after hours, and the back door just makes it more dangerous!” But those who are socially clumsy, like myself, can relate instantly. Navigating social situations is a skill that comes more naturally to some people than others, and people like me often find themselves completely misunderstanding what’s going on around them.
Usually it's little things. Like one time in college a girl I liked told me she was going to start swimming more often, so she could lose weight. I replied, “Good idea!” I meant the swimming, but it sounded like I was responding to the “lose weight” part. My life is a series of wrong responses like that.
There’s an old Dilbert strip where he meets an attractive woman and he says, “It’s a pleasure to meet me. I hope you never find a live turtle in your soup.” Dilbert’s next self-berating thoughts indicate that even he doesn’t know what he meant by that sentence. There’s a Big Bang Theory episode where Leonard tries to say “hello” and “hi” at the same time, and it comes out “Hi low”. That’s what we socially clumsy people do. We try to say multiple things at once so that they come out as random word salad. We change our mind halfway through sentences. Then we mentally beat ourselves up and become strangely quiet, sometimes halfway through a sentence.
When I first moved out of state, I missed a lot of my old friends. This was before e-mail was very common, so I sent out a lot of letters with my new contact information, hoping at least one of them would call or write me. One day the phone rang, and the caller sounded exactly like Apu from the Simpsons. One of my high school friends was good at doing cartoon voices, and Apu was one of his favorites.
Calling me up while imitating a Simpsons character was exactly the kind of thing he would do. So after he said his hellos, I responded with a very familial, “Hey, buddy, what’s up?” It wasn’t my friend. It turned out to be a telemarketer, and that was his actual accent. He sounded confused for a second, but went on with his spiel. I listened to everything he had to say, politely turned down whatever he was trying to sell, and started to say goodbye.
But before ending the call, he asked me, “By the way, when you first picked up, it sounded like you recognized my voice…”
“Sorry, yes, I thought you were a friend of mine.”
“Oh, is your friend of Indian descent?”
And then I said one of the stupidest, most racist things I’ve said in my life. “No, he just likes doing funny voices.” I swear, I could hear his face fall over the phone. All the animation went out of his voice, and he flatly said, “Well, it was a pleasure talking to you, have a good day.” I hung up the phone, and just sort of stared at the wall for several minutes, feeling as if I’d just kicked myself in the stomach, wondering how I could possibly have been dumb enough to say that.
Not that it makes a difference, but I probably wasn’t using “funny” to mean “humorous” so much as “unusual”. As in, “The engine is making a funny noise.” I don’t find anything inherently funny about Apu’s accent, but my friend’s ability to mimic so many voices was delightful. I’m well aware of the “Problem with Apu”, but from my friend’s POV he wasn’t making fun of people with accents, he was doing impressions of TV characters.
But still… yeesh. Of all the things to come out of my mouth.
These are the little things that keep me up at night.
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