I had already spent years doing occasional side work with around a dozen if not more folks originally from India. Most, except the oldest of the elders spoke good if not excellent English. But there’s pretty much always gonna be at least a subtle accent, if not a heavy accent with secondary languages.

I thought I understood the fella clearly, but it was both a combination of his accent plus the strange sentence structure context that threw me totally off.

He said he was ‘updating his tiles’, but I misunderstood his vowels, so I heard ‘updating his towels’

And why the hell would he use the word updating, he was literally having all the carpet removed in 44+ rooms and having tiles installed, not ‘updated’.

So even the context clues didn’t add up, I never guessed he was talking about the tile work he had been planning for months.