I was just going down memory lane and reviewing past jobs before I began working for my current employer, for whom I've worked for thirteen years. Considering the number of jobs I held prior to this one, it was more like a memory super highway. Anyway, I had this one job in college where I worked at a photo lab for a large drugstore chain. One of my tasks was to call customers when their pictures were ready.
I live in a culturally diverse community (aka Miami, it's only 30 miles from the U.S.) and one of the customers I called didn't speak any English. She answered the phone saying, "Oygo". Not knowing the correct spelling, I am spelling it phonetically. At a loss for words, well a loss for words in Spanish, I tried my best to recall the little I knew and I said "Pierdete". I then when to get a spanish speaking coworker who went to the phone only to discover the lady had hung up. He asked me what I had said and I told him that I had asked her to wait a minute in Spanish. "Ang how deed jew say et?", my colleague asked. So I told him: "Pierdete".
When he finished laughing he explained to me that I had meant to say "esperate", which when pronounced has the r come out like a soft d and the s gets swallowed a bit: "ehpeda-te". It turns out that piederte, which sounds a lot like "esperate" to a non-Spanish speaking native, means "get lost".
So she did!
I wasn't allowed to call customers anymore...for the remainder of my career with that employer, which was about two more weeks.
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2 comments:
How many of us WANT to tell people to get lost and we can't? I think that's funny.
That sounds like a froidian slip! Sure, you didn't really want to tell her to get lost. Hmmm...that reminds me of a couple of Spanish word stories I could post.
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