Cesia and I were talking about a few days of travelling she’ll need to do soon. She was using her phone to arrange transport for herself and her team, and narrating these things as we walked around a mall on a Wednesday afternoon, shopping for a USB stick.
“If his return flight is at 10am then we could go with him, but we’d have to wait around for a few hours. But that’s fine.”
I was not part of the “We,” and while this was directed at me, I had no information to draw on to respond.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I said, and read the back of a Kingston pack in Best Buy.
“Or we could get an Uber and go later, by ourselves.”
“Good point,” I said.
We decided to buy the USB stick online and left the mall. By the time we got in the car Cesia had organised her travel plans and explained them to me, including the comparative prices of renting a car and relying on Ubers.
We left the mall’s underground car park and joined the traffic.
“If it was me, I think I’d rather Uber,” I said. “Especially if I haven’t been there before.”
Cesia doesn’t drive, but she could see my point.
“Yeah,” she said. “You can work or read or look at the city.”
“Or nap,” I added as we crossed a lane, ready to u-turn towards home.
“Or prepare what you’re presenting to the client,” Cesia said.
“I think I’d rather Uber by myself as well,” I said. The drive from the airport to her client’s office is sometimes over an hour, and I wouldn’t like feeling trapped in a car, struggling to make conversation. Cesia agreed, but reminded me that there’s a budget, and everyone getting their own taxis is probably not the best use of it. I shrugged in unconvinced agreement, and remembered a time a few years ago when I failed to make conversation.
I wasn’t trapped in a car but behind a kiosk. I was 18, in my first job in the village supermarket across the street from my parents’ house. I had been working there for almost three years and, though I tended not to chat much with customers, there were occasional glimpses of recognition as people I had served a hundred times prior stepped up to my till.
A woman about my mother’s age put a half-full basket on my counter and I started scanning.
“Do you have a loyalty card?” I asked her. She looked at me and her expression changed. She recognised me.
“Hello Joe,” she said.
“Oh hi,” I smiled. “How are you?”
I should have asked who are you, because I had no idea.
“I’m doing well,” she said and handed over her cash.
“That’s good,” I said. “Everything…OK?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Bob’s getting on well,” she told me.
I smiled, as if knowing who Bob was, and gave the most generic answer I could.
“Is he?”
But she had been referring to her daughter, who was and still is a female named Bobbie, and who I had been good friends with for over five years.
“She,” Bobbie’s mother corrected.
Since this happened I have forgotten other people’s names or how I met them. I always find this awkward, but I’m getting better at saying, “I’m sorry, but remind me how we know each other.” This has never been met with offence, and usually serves as decent chitchat for at least a couple of minutes. The trick with this is to get it in early. With Bobbie’s mother, I was too late. So I looked her dead in the eye and pretended that she had heard me wrong.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding.
She looked confused. The situation had shifted and now she wasn’t sure how to deal with it. We both knew I had screwed up and was too embarrassed to acknowledge it, and she was too polite to challenge me. I handed her the receipt and told her to have a good day. Thankfully she left through the sliding automatic doors before my face could turn completely red with humiliation.
Bobbie and I haven’t spoken in years. Every so often there will be some miniscule interaction online between us; a like on instagram, for example, and I wonder if her mother ever told her about the time I called her He, and then pretended I hadn’t. Her mother would have had no reason to keep it a secret, and perhaps could have spun it into an entertaining little anecdote, highlighting my rudeness at forgetting who she was despite me having been in her home several times, and emphasising my utter stupidity at trying to play off my misgendering like it was her who had misheard.
I suspect not though. She likely had other things to do that day and other concerns to think about, and our 30-second transaction probably barely registered. I forgot who she was because I’m often self-absorbed, and I wonder if she talked about me for the same reason. And it’s also why, 12 years later, I’m still thinking about it.
Have you ever got a friend’s gender wrong? Tell me about it in the comments, or tweet me.
If you enjoyed this and want to read about me handling a different situation a lot more tactfully, click here.
Don't Call Me José 