[257/365] you aren't my mummy

[cosmolinguist]

The dishwasher repair person turned up this afternoon (in the two-hour window we expected him and everything!) mother_bones explained the problem to him and then went upstairs. diffrentcolours and I kept the sad, whiny Gary contained behind the closed living room door.

So when the guy was done, I was the person who went to get the debrief. But the first thing he said, he had to repeat about three times before I understood it.

It was "where's your mum?"

I couldn't understand his accent at first. The next time I still couldn't figure out what he was asking. I don't have a mum, I have a mom! (This is important to me.) She's 4000 miles away! I don't see how she comes into this! She doesn't even know the dishwasher is broken.

It took me ages to realize he was talking about mother_bones. He had to say "You weren't the lady I was talking to before!" before I figured it out. And this despite it not being the first time I (or D) have been mistaken for mother_bones's children: one of the cleaners also referred to her as my mum, and this story is one I always treasure. (I never did find out what that lady's name is! She hasn't been back this season.)

People don't know what to do with a household of three adults, things like this happen on a relatively regular basis. But since we don't encounter strangers that much, because pandemic, I forget how weird we can seem.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Ha! It's hard being spectacular.

[otter]

Love this ^^ !

[barakta]

I would never assume people's relationships but that's cos I'm woke and know too many atypical households and would stuff it up. I guess most tradespeople just wing it and if they're wrong hope no one is too annoyed.

[cosmolinguist]

I didn't mind at all that he thought I was MB's kid, I just minded that he seemed to think this made me useless to talk to about the dishwasher! :)

[azurelunatic]

Ha, now I'm wondering if the plumber would have been confused if I'd made an appearance as well this morning! (With the addition of Steph, we now have three adults in the household who aren't mostly allergic to strangers.)

[meepettemu]

Brilliant *sigh* :)

Fables and I confound our neighbour (who can’t tell us apart. We’re about the same height and size with similarly colour short asymmetrical haircuts). He asked me once where they were and I said they were at the gym and he said ‘oh yes, they do running’ (that’s me). He was still outside when they got home and he said to them ‘oh. I spoke to your “friend” earlier’.

Fables said to me ‘I’ve never been so insulted to have our relationship correctly labelled’