Miscommunication - Part 1

LOL, BTW, BFF, LU2, ROFLMAO... I could go on and on. In this new era of text messages, IM, blogs and what have you, there is a lot of room for miscommunication and misunderstanding. Sometimes that can spell really bad news, other times it can be purdy darn funny.

Example - my boss is Catholic, Italian, and a New Yorker to boot. She's pretty straight forward, to say the least. But, like some of us, she's still in the learning curve with all the new lingo out there in the world. She didn't know what LOL meant. Our VP of Marketing tends to use the term occasionally. One day, after getting another email from him with LOL in it, she finally turned around and asked me, "What does LOL mean?" At that exact moment, a co-worker in the next office over burst out laughing quite loudly. (You can't make this stuff up). Needless to say, through my own laughter, I took advantage of the situation to simply point to the other guy who was guffawing and say "It means that!" To which she replied, "Laughing? It means laughing? Oh, and here all this time I thought he was referring to me as Little Old Lady and was trying to decide if I should be offended." (She'll be 50 this year and is not happy about it). After laughing so hard we were crying and our sides hurt, we were finally able to recover and go back to work. Needless to say, since that day I have not been able to see LOL without thinking about that day and actually LAUGHING OUT LOUD myself, making it all the more ironic that I actually LAUGH when I see LOL. Go figure.