What’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever been part of?

Finally a question with giggle potential! Oh my, this gonna be good, but it will take a while, so grab a coffee or tea and some cookies. I first need to give you some context . . .

My native language is German. Yes, we do have English lessons in school, but honestly, they are useless as a hole in the the head.The “English” will bring you nowhere. I learned English much later, with my dictionary, the internet and a Yahoo email group for stationery for Outlook Express (I can imagine, most of you might not know that long lost mail app) and later in MMO’s on US servers. I’m actually still learning. There is still a word I don’t know yet. The point is, that when you are not into certain topics, you often don’t learn the words that relate to that topic. And that is the point where the story starts . . .

Follow me back to the year 2006 (I think it was 2006, give or take a year). SoE had just released a new EverQuest II expansion (Karnak something, I do not remember the name). The entire guild was online, everybody having fun. I was in one of the new zones collecting feathers from a bird called Cockatrice (fantasy bird, looked a bit like a colorful turkey) for one of the lazy NPC’s. Very annoying, these things looked so harmless and they hit like trucks, drop rate just horrible, to make sure you where stuck there for a while. The one of my guildies was asking for help with something. You need to know, at that time, there was no voice chat, typing was the method of talking and since not everybody was trained in typewriting we came up with all sorts of short forms, like brt, afk, pls, thx, well you get it. So that guildie asked for help and I, still killing those birds, answered with “I’ll brt, just have to smack a few more cocks”. Collective gasping, then silence. Then the first whispers came in and filled me in on what I just said. They knew that I’m not a native speaker and they knew that I was talking about those birds, but still it was hilarious. People where dropping of their chairs laughing. And that is what I mean with “there is always a new word to learn” and sometimes this “not knowing” can lead to really funny moments.

Have a funny day!