The lunchtime conversation had moved, quite naturally, to the discussion of facial recognition, branes, and chess. As it has been some twelve years since I last played chess (against Andrew; he won), my mind wandered...
"Are you playing this week?" one of my colleagues asked me, snapping my attention back to the moment.
Uh... what...
I quickly mentally reviewed the conversation, as filtered by the part of my brain that handles such things. There was no memory of the topic changing away from chess, but since I'd never given any indication of ever having played chess, surely it couldn't be that? So, back through the lunch conversation topics to something that might match...
"Not this week. The next competition is on the... 29th."
Cue lots of very confused looks. "What competition is that, then?"
"Uh, well, with my band... Did I just drift off and miss five minutes there, or something?"
It turned out that I hadn't not been paying sufficient attention; he was asking if I was playing badminton this week, but hadn't actually provided any context to indicate that he was changing the subject. Which strikes me as quite crule really.
(Incidentally, I know is misspelt 'cruel' above, but it struck me as such a great typo that I had to leave it alone. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.)
2 comments:
So are you ready to go? I'm so glad you said yes when nobody else would...
What's that?
You don't know what I'm talking about?
Neither do I.
I, like many of those who share my genetic pool, tend to do that changing-the-subject-without-providing-much-context-at-a-moments-notice-to-something-that-we-talked-about-last-Tuesday-for-about-5-seconds thing quite a lot. It infuriates my fiancee.
In my defense, I can always see where the link is, and I always think that I give enough context, even when enough is not very much. But she does perhaps have a point.
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