What Kind of Bike?

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What’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever been part of?

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It was probably not the funniest misunderstanding I have ever been part of, but it was the most recent.

We were having dinner at the college and meeting someone for the first time. The conversation turned to what everyone had done over the weekend.

He mentioned that he had gone for a ride on his bike from Sydney Olympic Park down to the Southern Highlands.

Someone asked how long it had taken.

“About an hour and a half,” he said.

That should have been the moment when the penny dropped. It did not.

Instead, we quietly accepted that we were sitting with someone capable of cycling from Sydney Olympic Park to the Southern Highlands in ninety minutes. Perhaps we assumed he was unusually fit. Maybe we were too polite to question it. Once we had heard the word bike, we had already built the rest of the story ourselves.

Then came the next question.

“Have you been watching the Tour?”

He looked puzzled.

“Tour? What Tour?”

“The Tour de France.”

“No,” he said. “I was riding my motorcycle.”

There was a brief silence while two completely different conversations finally collided. Then we all laughed.

The wonderful thing was that no one had misheard anything. He had said bike. We had heard bike. The only difficulty was that he meant one kind and we imagined another. For several minutes, he had been talking about a motorcycle while we had been picturing Lycra, water bottles and heroic climbing stages.

Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the conversation immediately changed direction.

“What do you own?” someone asked. “1000cc?”

And just like that, the Tour de France disappeared and we entered the world of engine size.

It was a small reminder that conversation is not simply about the words people say. We are constantly filling in the gaps, supplying context and constructing a story. Most of the time, our stories are close enough to keep things moving.

Sometimes, however, one person is riding a bicycle and the other is riding a motorcycle. At least in their heads.