Ignorance isn't bliss

This past week everyone in my department received an email entitled "Wanted: French Interrupter." It was forwarded by our department secretary, who had received it from the Human Resources Manager at a big corporation with a regional headquarters somewhere he in the city. The e-mail went on to specify that he was "looking for a French Interrupter to interrupt semi-technical documents from French to English" and that he anticipated "90 documents needing interrupting." Because the word was repeated so many times, I thought I must have missed something. Maybe there was such a thing as an Iinterrupter, a special person whose chief duty it is to shout out in French during the middle of meetings, bringing everything to a halt.

But when I started talking to my classmates, I realized this was indeed a horrible gaff on the part of the HR guy. He obviously did understand the procedure of translating one language into another and had taken a wild guess at the correct term, falling far left of the mark and consequently, making himself the butt of many jokes. I just hope none of them actually made it back to his ears.

This situation made me wonder, though, why such seemingly horrific errors are so disturbing. I remember once flying from Chicago back to the northeast and discussing with the woman in the seat next to me where we'd each grown up. She was born and raised in Chicago, but I'd said I was from Connecticut. Soon it came out she had no idea where Connecticut was. I think she may have asked me if it was anywhere near Massachusetts. I tried my best to hide it, but in all honesty, I was appalled. How could anyone who had lived her whole life in the U.S. not know where Connecticut was?

Somehow, these moments of ignorance exposed aren't just humorous or pathetic. They're really kind of frightening, at least to me, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because my vision of the world is rocked when these moments arise. I expect adults, especially people in positions of authority, to be wiser than I am. And when it comes out that one or two of them are not, I am shocked. Part of me is ashamed for judging these people who suffer only from a lack of education, but another part of me needs to laugh it off in order to avoid losing my balance. And part of me wants to accept that there is another explanation for these gaps in what should be standard knowledge: maybe in some far more complex technical context, when drafting documents in a foreign language, the specific services provided by an Interrupter are absolutely essential. Maybe I'm the one who has yet to learn just how important an Interrupter really is.