I just HAD to share the conversation I overheard today, because if I'd heard it from, say, The Two Ronnies or even Harry Enfield & Kathy Burke I'd have been rolling in the aisles.
Somehow in a bank queue that wouldn't have felt like appropriate behaviour ... anyway:
You know how you suddenly hear a word spoken in the background hubbub and find yourself tuning into a particular conversation? The two old dears behind me were complaining about how they had to stand for so long on a hot day waiting to be served, and the bloke behind them suddenly chipped in that last week someone had had an "epp-electric" fit in the queue.
Well I bit my lip and ignored that, but it set Sissy & Ada off on the inevitable conversation about friends with increasingly serious diseases, which included the following glorious piece of linguistic ignorance about the unavoidable consequence of motor-neurone disease (apols to anyone with suffering relatives).
Sissy: "Well she was told she wouldn't even be able to swallow, and she couldn't bear that, so she got 'er 'usband to take 'er for that, y'know ... Euronasia.
Ada: "Euthanasia?" [Obviously the brains of the outfit here]
Sissy: "No, she was old and they went to Switzerland"
I almost had to feign an epp-electric fit of my own to avoid wetting myself ...
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7 comments:
That's the sort of thing that make me look for the cameras.
Good story DsD. This is one of my fav websites...
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/
They tend to stereotype people sometimes, which I don't like, but it has this quality of making you realize everyone is crazy and making you glad other people realize everyone is crazy all at the same time. Which is oddly comforting.
There's an overheardindublin.com too, which also stereotypes a lot. Having said that, walking around Dublin and overhearing various conversations, some days you realise how stereotypes become stereotypes. As Steenbeck kind of said, lots of crazies out there.
It was a long queue; I must have been in it for almost half-an-hour. Before she hooked up with Ada, Sissy had been quizzing a Bank of Scotland employee for a good ten minutes about how safe her money was, because she'd seen this TV programme last week [Panorama? Dispatches?] that she wouldn't get paid out, because the banks would pinch HER savings to pay their debts to each other first; AND a good friend of hers whose nephew worked for the Bradford & Bingley had whispered that the B&B was in trouble. How this floor-greeter had the patience to listen to the drivel is beyond me ...
Oh come on, DD - lots of people (not only old ones) don't understand financial stuff - I remember having a LONG conversation with my aged dad about whether we should embrace the euro - he was agin it, but eventually I found out he thought that if we did change, all his savings would just disappear, because they were in pounds...
Ah, but I wasn't having a pop at that kind of incomprehension per se, tfd, so I apologise if it sounded like that.
Mention computers, car mechanics or bsic plumbing to me, and I would be just as thick.
If you'd have heard her, it was the bizarre non-sequiturs, taken as proof that the sky was falling in, that were making my teeth grind.
The 'youth'enasia was the comic relief at the end of having to listen to all that whilst simultaneously wrestling with an impatient Darcey (whose reins some idiot - DD glances in mirror - had left in the car)!
Worthy of Sissy and Ada indeed. Made me smile.
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