The fine art of miscommunicating

Things I have learned about communicating and interacting with others... 

When they've sounded "Taps" in Army boot camp ending the training day -- it's not really a good idea to strut up and down the barracks hallway, impersonating your drill sergeant when you think he's gone for the day.

Suppose you're in the fifth grade and in the school spelling bee in a crowded gym with your Mom looking on. You misspell a word and they "ding" you out of competition. And you react by muttering an expletive you've heard a gazillion times before.

When you get an e-mail from a "friend" in your office asking for your opinion about corporate's  "latest and greatest idea. " Never -- EVER --  hit the Reply All button.

If you're in a foreign country, say, like Nicaragua, your Spanish-speaking skills won't necessarily work if the stranger you're trying to speak to turns out to be a visitor from the Mideast. 

You meet a celebrity, a guy who has co-starred in 1960s beach movies with Annette, and the best thing you can mutter is, "Boy, you sure do have a lot of kids to be such a short guy!"

That when you are young newspaper reporter and writing a crime story and on deadline -- and the sheriff's last name is "Dick" -- be careful of typos that place the word-article "the" before his name. Some folks reading it the next morning might think you're editorializing and the sheriff doesn't think the mistake is very funny. A related lesson? Copy editors sometimes are neither.

Say you're 12 years old and shoplifting a necklace for a girl in your class as a Christmas present, and you turn around to the man who has been trailing you and say, "Sir, this may seem like a strange question, but why are you following me? I hope you don’t think I’m shoplifting!"

You have just been introduced to give a presentation to a large crowd, and as you stand to approach the microphone you forget that you're still furiously trying to dry-rub away water that has spilled onto the front of your pants.

That an uptight elderly third-grade teacher -- with hair the color of moldy Velveeta cheese  -- monitoring the school cafeteria will never believe you when you tell her that the reason you didn't eat the mashed potatoes is because of an allergic reaction that will cause you to bleed from your ears and eyes and eventually kill you if you eat them.

Yep. Always lessons to be learned.