"My daughter’s new bike is bi-sexual”

Uhhh, pardon?

“Yes, it is good because my son can also ride it”.

Sometimes I have a little fun with English-as-a-second-language in the workplace. It’s one of the few joys in my otherwise not-so-exciting day, so I typically won’t correct a person who is using the wrong word in a funny way. That way I can chuckle when they keep using it and it keeps me awake in boring meetings. Like when the French consultants were all saying that we need to “formulize” the agreement (heehee) and within a week my Belgian colleagues were all also using this word.

Two weeks ago I sent my boss a picture of an unambiguously unhappy-looking cat and playfully suggested that we use this instead of the :-( -symbol.

My Belgian colleague saw the humour in the idea and innocently started to refer to this image as “The Pussy”. He would say things like “We shouldn’t do it that way because it will make The Pussy unhappy”.

I’d smile to acknowledge the inside joke, but in my head I’d be howling with laughter.

The 1st time he did this, no one in my group flinched, so they are all either oblivious to the alternate significance of this term, or they are doing the same thing I am.

It’s just that now this guy has started to say use this around other people – such as French IBM consultants -- in sentences like “Oh, you better not do that because you’ll make Colleen’s Pussy unhappy”.

Yesterday I overheard him say to someone “I should send you the picture of Colleen’s angry Pussy”.

So now I don’t think it’s so funny. Now this has to stop. But here’s the thing… now I don’t quite know how to tell him to stop because I didn’t correct him all those other times.

But he will stop, won’t he? Today I’m sending him a picture of an angry dog and hope he thinks it’s funnier than the cat.

All this to say that today, when my colleague described his daughter’s Christmas bicycle as “bi-sexual”, I corrected him immediately. I mean, it would have been funny to let him run with the term, but really I don’t need him standing up in our next team meeting saying something like “Colleen did a nice job of massaging the bisexual data” when what he means is that I was in charge of the “gender-nonspecific data”.

What my colleagues do not know is that I have absolutely no right to be smug. See, you lose that privilege when you come from where I come from: