Ozark Oddments: What We Have Here Is Failure to Communicate

Tuesday, July 04, 2023

What We Have Here Is Failure to Communicate

A couple of nights ago I was putting food on the plates for dinner. Richard was having noodles to go with the pork dish I had prepared.

Richard says, “Put the fork on the noodles” and rolls off to take care of something in his office.

I don’t think too much about this because occasionally he forgets his fork and one of us (usually me) has to come back and get it . I figured he just wanted to make sure he had a fork.

So I put the fork on the noodles and put the pork next to the noodles.

He comes back, looks at his plate, and says, “I told you to put the pork on the noodles."

“No, you said ‘put the fork on the noodles’, which is what I did.”

Well, of course he didn’t say “fork,” I just heard it wrong, but we had to discuss it for a while, which became yet another hilarious conversation.

Just a bit ago Richard shouts from the kitchen, “I switched the tacos.”

What?

So I get up and go in the kitchen. “What do you mean you switched the tacos?”

"No.” he says, “I squished a cockroach. And you can put a fork on my noodles.”

I put the squished cockroach on the deck railing for the birds.

3 comments:

Carla from The River said...: Ha... oh my yes, a failure to communicate.
Good Luck!!; 3:42 PM
Jenny the Pirate said...: This is a great story. I came to your blog from Carla's blog and I think I will stick around. I am always hearing something other than what has been said. My favorite such story is when we were in church many years ago and I must have been woolgathering because I HEARD the preacher say "... children of leprechauns." So I thought, hmmm, I didn't know leprechauns were even real, really, much less parents. I'll have to ask TG about it on the way home. When I did, he said DEAR, what he was talking about was children of LEPER COLONIES. Oh. I wasn't familiar with that concept either but it made more sense than leprechauns, haaahaha xoxo; 3:05 PM
Leilani Schuck Weatherington said...: Thank you Jenny the Pirate for the great comment. I sometimes let a lot of time go by between posts on the blog so please do check back periodically. I realize it is hard to keep people interested when the blogger doesn't post that often but my creative juices are often a a low ebb after working all day.; 4:53 PM

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Thoughts to ponder

Most of us go through life so absorbed in the cocoon of ourselves that we rarely stop to consider the other. Of course, we think that we do; indeed, we may pride ourselves on our capacity for empathy; we may be considerate and thoughtful in our dealings with others, but how often do we stand before them. so to speak, and experience what it is to be them?--Domenica Macdonald

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall
Smith

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Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering -- because you can't take it in all at once. --Audrey Hepburn

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I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.--Agatha Christie

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Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.--Katharine Hepburn

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One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

"Two people... told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is. I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities. I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thoughness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one another"?--Madeline L'Engle, "A Circle of Quiet"