867-5309

Image via Wikipedia

A buddy of mine told me a hilar­i­ous story recently that sent me into hys­ter­ics. I asked to share it on here and he so grace­fully said yes.

A lit­tle back­ground: Dur­ing his lunches, he takes Span­ish lessons, via Skype, while in his truck. Odd dude…I know.

Span­ish les­son today was describ­ing how loud the Brooks and Dunn con­cert was.

I had been explain­ing that my boss had asked for earplugs from the wait­ress (box seats).

Dur­ing class, words that I’m not sure on I just say in Eng­lish such as “earplugs”…

Mi jefe pidió para “earplugs” de la camarera.

…then she types in the Skype chat win­dow that word that I need to learn for the sentence.

To my sur­prise, for the word earplugs I heard her say and then type “tam­pones” (tam-pon-ees).

I sort of gig­gled, scratched my head like Will Rogers and said, “Well that kinda makes sense when you think about it! <Ahem>”

She nod­ded politely, “Ok.”

<Sigh> I adjusted my head­phones and micro­phone ner­vously took a breath and took another run at it.

Mi jefe pidió para tam­pones de la camar­era.

Sud­denly I saw my Span­ish teacher grin­ning and wav­ing her arms in front of her face like a deck hand on air­craft car­rier try­ing to wave off the incom­ing plane from a poten­tial crash landing.

“No, no, no!! No Har­vey, that is wrong!”

“What did I say?”

She paused and leaned into the camera:

“Not TAM-po-nes! TAP-ones!”

ROTFBL — [Rolling on truck floor-board laughing]

Chok­ing through laugh­ter and tears I thanked her for the cor­rec­tion because all I kept see­ing in my mind was a Brooks and Dunn con­cert audi­ence pop­u­lated with big black cow­boy hats on the heads and lit­tle white strings in the ears.

(And yep…“tam-po-nes” means “tampons”.)