June 28, 2006

Product of the American school system

This afternoon at work an IT guy came around looking for a co-worker of mine who was not in his office. After dealing with business stuff, he walked off, but then he came back because he wanted to have a look at the map of Europe that's behind my desk. So he started looking closely at the map, finding Amsterdam and pointing at Oxford (because he'd just been there). I didn't recognize this guy and was confused because he didn't sound Dutch and, as far as I knew, all our IT people were Dutch. I assumed he was just new or something though and that he lived here, but I eventually found out that he's from Pittsburgh and had to come over to do some stuff in Oxford and Amsterdam.

Anyway, so as he looked at the map, it became more and more evident that geography wasn't this guy's strong point, as well as maybe a couple of other things. He was talking about how you can take a train from Amsterdam to Paris and they look so close, but it takes 4 hours. He then said "There's a train that goes to England, right?" and I said, yeah, you have to go from Brussels and then it crosses the channel in the tunnel. And he said "Underwater?" Oy. The names on the map started to confuse him because all of the place names are in their native language instead of being in English or Dutch or whatever (which I think is pretty cool). I pointed out how it said España instead of Spain and he was all "Oh, yeah... I see." Then I just threw in there that it says Nederland instead of the Netherlands, and he first said "The Netherlands, where's that? Oh duh, right, that's where we are." Yep. Quick one. So he looked at "Nederland" on the map and said "Isn't that how it's spelt in English?" And I explained that in English it is with a "th". He'd apparently forgotten that as well.

The capper though came when he spotted Austria and tried to pronounce "Österreich", as it was on the map. He asked me what country that was. I said it was Austria. He was like "No, isn't Austria down there somewhere?" and he pointed in the general area of Turkey and Romania. I said no, Austria is, well, where it is on the map. And I don't remember what he said exactly, but I came to realize that he was meaning Australia. I said "No, not Australia! Austria." And he seriously said "I always thought Austria and Australia were the same thing." Oh my god. He didn't know what Austria was. I said "You know, Vienna, the Alps, all that..." but it wasn't ringing a bell with him. *smacks forehead*

He sort of saved himself later by noticing Iceland up in the corner and naming it correctly. But he got very confused by the native names of Norway and Sweden ("Where'd the 'way' in Norway go?"). Thank god he didn't look at Finland and start pondering the native name of that one (Suomi).

In English territory, he asked me if Great Britain and the United Kingdom are the same. I'm a bit ignorant myself in this area and I told him they were the same, but I had a feeling I was wrong, and I was. Oh well, it's close enough. He then started asking me though if the UK is part of Europe and if so, why they don't have the Euro, and oh lord, that was a road I did not want to go down. Fortunately he didn't ask much about it.

As I write this, I think, man, the joke's on me if he was just taking the piss to see how I'd react, but at the time, I did not get any sense of irony from the guy. It was just so American.