Lost in Translation

Many years ago, my mom worked in an office building on a side street that ran parallel to a busy main road. The problem was getting onto that main road. The connecting street was so close to a major intersection that it only took a few cars waiting at the traffic light to block anyone trying to get out. During rush hour, getting home from work could be an exercise in patience, especially when you could see the road you needed to be on but couldn't get to it.

Eventually, someone decided to do something about it. Construction signs appeared, and work began on moving the entrance farther down the road, where getting in and out would presumably be easier. It seemed like a fairly straightforward project. Move the entrance, redirect the traffic, and everyone could go home without having to calculate the precise speed of approaching cars before making a break for it.

Of course, this was road construction, so straightforward was never part of the plan.

The project dragged on. Weeks passed, progress was difficult to detect, and everyone continued navigating the same awkward intersection while waiting for whatever improvement was supposed to be coming. Every day, Mom and her coworkers wondered when the work would finally be finished. At some point, I imagine they had exhausted every possible way of asking the question.

Just up the road from Mom's office was a Home Depot accessed by the same parallel road that went to her office. One afternoon, Mom and Dad had been shopping there and were leaving the parking lot when they found themselves waiting to pull onto that same busy road, still dealing with the same inconvenient traffic situation on a busy Saturday.

Dad looked over at the unfinished construction and asked, “I thought they were going to fix this?”

Mom replied, “That's a wiki-basket.”

Dad looked at her, puzzled.

“What's a wiki-basket?”

Mom started laughing. Then, making sure to enunciate every word, she explained:

“That's. What. We. Keep. Asking!”

Dad thought that was hilarious, and of course, he had to share the story with the rest of us. Somewhere along the way, “wiki-basket” became part of our family vocabulary, our own term for those moments when someone hears something entirely different from what was said. It happens a lot.

The best part is that every so often, someone unfamiliar with the term gives us the same puzzled look Dad gave Mom all those years ago, and we get to tell the story again.

The road was eventually finished, Mom's office moved, and life went on. The wiki-basket stayed.

A little grace, a little grit, plenty of laughter,

~Stef