I’m not feeling great, so my boyfriend is getting me some lunch. We have some frozen stuff, but while the outside is hot, the middle isn’t. My boyfriend puts it back into the microwave and — surprise, surprise — it’s hot when it comes out. He then does some “hot potato” to keep it from burning his hands before putting it on the table.

Me: “Why didn’t you grab a tea towel and use that to carry it?”

Boyfriend: *Jokingly* “Because I am a man, and I do stupid stuff and mistake it for courage!”

I burst out laughing.

As is common in Brazil, my grandmother employs someone to clean the house and cook lunch for her. In previous years, it wasn’t a lot of work as it was a fairly small house. However, as my grandmother has gotten older, she does need more care, so the workload has increased. Her employee was informed about this and given the choice to stay or move on; she chose to stay. The family around her helps as much as possible, but as we all work full-time, we need someone there. I’ve moved over fairly recently, and while I can speak decent Portuguese, I’m not fluent.

One day as I am teaching, I get a phone call from my grandmother’s employee. The line is pretty bad, and her accent is quite thick for me, so I don’t always understand her.

Employee: “Hi, [My Name]. [Grandmother] is not feeling well. I’ve tried calling your uncle and his wife a few times, but they are not picking up.”

Now, what you have to understand is that [Employee] is only supposed to call me in an emergency. Her calling at this time of day is unusual in itself, and I immediately think of the worst-case scenario. She really sounds upset as if my grandmother is not responding to her.

Me: “Okay, what’s going on? Is my grandmother okay?”

Employee: “[Grandmother] is not feeling great. Can you come over to look after her?”

Me: “Okay, I can come if it is an emergency. Is it an emergency?”

Employee: “Ah, she needs help.”

Me: “Is it an emergency?”

I get some non-committal noise, so I say I’m on my way and hang up.

My student has heard my side of the conversation and accepts my apology when I say something has come up and I need to go. My uncle’s (my grandmother’s son) wife rings to ask what is going on, and I fill her in. She says she can arrive in the afternoon but to call her when I get to my grandmother’s house.

I get there about thirty minutes later to find my grandmother looking a bit haggard. I establish that she isn’t in pain, though, and things are normal for her. [Employee] says that she was in pain but is okay now. I call my uncle’s wife to tell her everything seems normal and I’m not sure what the problem was. I’m a bit annoyed to be called out and worried out of my mind when nothing seems to be wrong.

Suddenly, [Employee]’s family arrives just after lunch is ready, and now I’m really confused. We give my grandmother her lunch, and I have a few leftover bits as no one was expecting me there. After that, [Employee] packs up and leaves. I text my family to let them know she has suddenly left while keeping an eye on my grandmother.

My grandmother soon goes for an afternoon nap, and not long afterward, the cavalry arrives in the form of my uncle’s wife at the same time that my boyfriend arrives to drive me back to our flat. (I don’t have my own car.) Here, I finally get the full story.

You see, in Portuguese the second- and third-person singular are treated the same with only the pronoun changing the person. However, unlike in English, it’s not common to say the pronoun, so many people will say “tá bem” meaning “you are well” or “she is well”. During the phone call I got, [Employee] wasn’t feeling well and was calling to ask if I could take over as my grandmother cannot be left alone. Therefore, when I thought [Employee] was talking about my grandmother, she was talking about herself.

But here is the problem. [Employee] has done this before — calling in sick suddenly when she’s just feeling a bit tired, and the rest of the family knows to double-check this. Except for me, as I’ve just moved to the city. In reality, I could have finished the lesson and gone afterward, but [Employee] didn’t want to do anything she didn’t need to do. She has a history of also arriving late without explanation or not turning up at all if she doesn’t feel like working. (When she is sick she tends to actually tell us she can’t come in and she sounds ill those times.) While my grandmother was well, it was a situation between [Employee] and her, but now she needs help and can’t be left alone, so this situation can’t continue.

We are having a family meeting to decide if we should give the worker her tenth chance to change her mind and attitude or to say she can’t keep looking after my grandmother, or if we should make that decision for her.

I’m currently job hunting in Brazil, and I get lucky and am able to score an interview in a lab. I arrange with the professor in charge to interview on a certain day, but she warns me that things might have to change as her father is going to have surgery. I say that of course that is not a problem and I hope I will see her soon.

The day before my interview, I get an email from the professor saying that her father “faleceu”, which I understand to mean that there have been some complications and she needs to be there to take care of him, so she needs to reschedule the interview. I send an email back saying it’s not a problem and wishing the best of luck to her father.

Later at lunch, I mention this to my boyfriend, and he asks to check the email. He is a native Portuguese speaker, while I am still learning but at a decent level. He then turns to me with a look of complete horror.

Boyfriend: “[My Name], her father didn’t worsen. He died! Please tell me you didn’t wish for him to get better!”

Me: “Not exactly. I did wish him the best of luck, though.”

Cue frantic scrambling by both of us to draft an email begging for forgiveness and asking if I could start again. Luckily, it was clear from the CV I had submitted that Portuguese wasn’t my first language

I got the first interview, and I don’t think I did too badly as I got a call back for the job. Lesson learned, though: always double-check unfamiliar words before replying to emails.

I’ve recently moved to Brazil, and while my Portuguese is good, I still make mistakes sometimes.

I’ve just gotten a smoothie from my aunt. I want to ask her, “Was this made with the milk powder without lactose?” as I am really intolerant to the stuff.

What I actually say:

Me: “Was this made with the milk powder without milk?”

That was slightly embarrassing but not too terrible… except when my boyfriend informed me, with a giant grin on his face, that to ask for just powder in Portuguese is slang for cocaine.

Luckily, my aunt knew what I meant, but I don’t think I’m going to live that one down for a while.

A few years ago, I was traveling home hoping to visit my family. It was a direct flight, about ninety minutes, early in the morning. Due to unusual foggy weather, we could not land. Since my hometown rarely had issues, the pilot believed it would clear and kept flying around waiting for it to be safe.

It didn’t happen, and by the time they gave up, we didn’t have enough fuel to go all the way back, so they took us to the biggest airport in the country, around halfway between the two towns. There, they assured us, we would be taken care of and boarded onto a plane the second the weather cleared.

When we got there, however, the crew from our plane disappeared, and the airport employees had no idea we were even coming. Nothing was communicated to them, and they looked lost and panicky. They were certain, though, that it was impossible for them to just come up with a plane to take us to our destination, and they would have to find some alternative.

They put us in a corner of the airport — not in any specific room, just an area not being used at the time. I was sitting on one of the conveyor belts behind a check-in counter because there were not enough seats for everyone and there were a lot of older people. 

After some arguing, the staff gave us vouchers for food that barely covered anything in the overpriced airport restaurants. We asked for our luggage so we could get toothbrushes, changes of clothes, deodorant, etc. We had been there for about three hours already. They said it was impossible to locate our luggage at the moment, but we could see it in a corner behind them, and we pointed it out. They said that corporate policy prevented them from giving us our luggage. It took a lot of arguing from some of the loudest passengers for them to allow us a moment to go to our luggage and get whatever we needed. 

When the four-hour mark hit and we had no information on what would happen to us, we went back to hunt an employee and demand some solution — put us in a hotel, take us back home, do something. They just repeated the same thing, over and over: they were doing their best to accommodate us, but there was no solution at the moment because all the flights were full.

I asked if they could provide us with a bus. It was a six-hour trip, more or less, to either of the cities. It had been way more than that since we’d left our homes. They said they would check, and thirty minutes later, they said it was possible and they only needed to know who would go to which city and who would rather wait. 

Relieved, we gave them our information and waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently, the traffic was terrible and the buses were stuck. It took over two hours for them to get there. No second voucher for food was provided, although we got some water, at least. 

When they actually showed up, we found out that the company had messed up the number of people who would go to each city. That meant that people going back to where we started had to be cramped up with no seats left, while people moving on to our original destination had two full buses with not enough people to fill even one. I got lucky and was on the latter, so I was able to sleep all the way through using two seats.

I could have sued. They broke so many laws with the lack of support they gave us that it would have been an easy case. I decided not to; I didn’t want to spend more time and energy on it.

The thing is, I ended up working for that company. There, I found out that they had meticulously calculated how much it costs to follow the law versus how much it would cost in lawsuits and how many people are likely to go to court. If it’s cheaper to follow the law, they do it. If not, they’d rather keep their passengers hanging.