‘We’re going on holiday,’ a customer would tell me over the phone as I was booking them in for their loan appointments.
Quite often, I used to respond cheerfully with ‘Oh? Anywhere nice?’
After a few times of asking the question enthusiastically, I cringed as a profound realization hit me at the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper:
If people are going on holiday, they tend to choose nice places.
After recovering from the shock of coming up with such earth-shattering wisdom all by myself and admiring my own cleverness, I contemplated an alternative answer.
‘Going anywhere nice?’
‘No, we thought we would go somewhere really really terrible.’
‘Err … oh … what place would that be?’
‘To my mother-in-law’s.’
Being lost for what to say to comfort the poor soul, I would try to get them off the phone or out of my sight as quickly as I could. So, I decided that before anyone answered the question with a negative, I’d better stop asking it. So, I have changed the question to ‘Where are you going?’
Most of the time people would reply ‘We’re going to Cornwall.’ Or ‘We’re going to Madrid.’ Or ‘Greece’ or any of the places that I have never been, so have absolutely no idea what it would be like. But then even when people tell me they’re going to the places I have been, I still have no idea what the place would be like. I have a black hole in my brain for any geographical information. A lucky few bits and pieces of detail escaped the black hole so I at least know that Cornwall is in the UK and Madrid is not. And I know with 100% certainty that I am in the UK.
Just when I thought I had become wiser by avoiding that question that could potentially get me into an awkward situation, I heard myself say the other day ‘I’m not a typical Burmese.’
Again, I cringed as another realization hit me on the head, this time with a walking stick:
It’s always other people who are typical. Never you.
Typical means ordinary, not special or unique in any way. Who in their right mind (or wrong mind for that matter) would assign those traits to themselves?
I thought of an alternative to my declaration:
‘I’m typical. I do what everyone else does. I dress like everyone else. I even pile my hair up on top of my head so that I look like I have a huge pile of dog pooh stuck there. I like it that way because that’s the popular hairstyle these days.’
In fact, if anyone actually makes that statement, they are being atypical.
I wonder how many other typicals around the world said with their heads up in the air in their own different languages at that exact moment …
‘I am NOT typical.’
I cringe.