Reverse Engineering

One of the things Rod and I have been getting better at is reverse engineering conversations. When someone says something to us we don't quite grasp, either because the speaker's using Hindi, or heavily accented English, we try to work out the most likely sentence, and then give a good answer to that question. Sure, sometimes we're going to get that sentence wrong, but it's amazing how often the answer to the question we think was asked is good enough. Rod does it all the time when he orders Papa John's pizza. He says he rarely knows what the person on the line is saying, but by stating clearly and slowly, "one Super Papa, one medium Margarita, one garlic breadsticks" and giving his phone number, forty five minutes later we get the pizzas we wanted.

While in Jaipur we discovered we weren't the only ones using this technique. One of the things Jaipur is famous for is patchwork quilts. We had really been looking forward to seeing some quilts until we laid eyes on them. Maybe they had some lovely ones elsewhere, but in the bazaars and emporiums the quality was really rather poor. We saw some hand quilted ones which had stitches to the inch. I say stitches, there was more than one, but not many more. In the emporium at Jaigarh Fort, Rod found a quilt with machine stitched motifs which had some very large stitches. He turned to me and said, "Constant speed. They don't have Intellistitch." The sales guy obviously reverse engineered this statement to be something like, "look honey, quilting", because he replied "hand stitched". Rod then pointed to the flat top thread and the loops of bobbin thread clearly visible on the front of the quilt and said "tight top tension?". The sales guy reverse engineered this to be far more positive than it was, because he replied, "You like?" In unison we replied, "NO!" While sales guy's sales pitch may work most of the time, it's never going to work when he's trying to sell to the husband of a longarm quilter!