“We lost my brother…” appeared as a text message on my phone from a close friend recently.
In utter shock, my immediate response was “Which brother and what has happened??” since I had spoken to him the previous day and he had not hinted about anyone of his brothers and brothers-in-law, who I also know quite well, as ailing in any way. I quickly followed up with a phone call to my wife to break the sad news to her because this was terrible and as she was quite close to the wife of the sender of the message, she could perhaps get more information about this tragedy.
A few minutes later I got a call from my friend the sender of the bad news, with my first instinct being to ignore it since I am not very good at condoling with people more so if the tragedy (my assumption was that it had to have been an accident) had just happened. My better judgement took over and I accepted the call braced for a sad and solemn telephone call from one recently bereaved, and all was revealed!
The previous day, I had sent a text message to my friend with an innocent “How is Liz doing?”
To put everything into perspective, my friend with whom I am quite close to and call each other 'brother' has a sister called Liz who was vying as a women’s representative in a county on the slopes of Mount Kenya. My friend had been actively involved in campaigns for the sister and had virtually camped there for the previous two weeks doing whatever needed doing to get people to vote for her.
The day I sent the text message to him enquiring about Liz was the day after the recent general elections (presidential results still awaited - a story for another day) and he had commenced his journey back to Nairobi. We had also coincidentally spoken soon after my text to him and I had assumed that he had decided to talk to me rather than texting back. We spoke about the sister’s fortunes and he told me he was not sure how she was doing as it was tough fight and some votes had not yet been tallied in her strongholds and as he could not wait for the final tallying had decided to return to Nairobi to catch up on other pressing matters.
My friend eventually saw my message enquiring about Liz the next day after a tiring 300 km journey where he never checked his messages and responded with the famous “We lost my brother…” message and I killed one of his brothers just like that!!
Now think about this for a moment at the comedy of errors here. I send a text, he calls me back and I assume it was as a result of my text. He sees my message the next day and responds to his 'brother' that his sister has lost but since we had spoken my original text is already long forgotten by me and I assume the worst.
We were both victims of assumptions, me assuming that the phone call the previous day was due to my text and hence the matter of the sisters fate having been concluded and him assuming that my enquiry about his sister had been sent the same day that he responded.
If you were in my shoes how would you have reacted?
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