Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 744, Dealing with a Mistake.
This is English as a Second Language podcast episode 744.
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This episode is a dialogue between Jenny and her boss about making mistakes.
Let's get started.
A miscommunication?
There are 16 copiers in this office.
Who ordered 16 copiers?
No one did.
Clearly, wires got crossed somewhere.
I'll try to get to the bottom of this, but the copiers will be removed before lunch.
I can't even walk to my office with all of these machines in here.
How am I supposed to get any work done?
I'm looking for the purchase order right now to see if the mistake was on our end or on their end.
Let me know as soon as you figure it out.
I want to know who's responsible for this.
Right.
I'll let you know.
No doubt it was just a clerical error.
No harm, no foul.
No harm, no foul?
This screw-up has cost me half a day's productivity.
I think that's plenty of harm done.
You're right, sir.
I stand corrected.
I'm sure it was just an honest mistake.
Stop making excuses for the person responsible for this debacle.
Jenny, why are you making excuses for the person responsible?
You look thirsty.
I'll go get you some coffee right now.
The title of this episode is Dealing with a Mistake.
To deal with means to handle, to take care of.
And Jenny and her boss need to deal with a mistake.
The boss asks Jenny somewhat angrily, what is going on here?
What is happening here?
Jenny says there was a miscommunication.
A miscommunication is a nice way, a polite way, of saying that somehow two people didn't understand each other.
One person thought there was one meaning.
The other person thought it meant something else.
And so the two of them did not properly communicate.
The boss says, again, somewhat angrily, a miscommunication.
There are 16 copiers in this office.
Who ordered 16 copiers?
A copier is also called a photocopier.
Many people call it a Xerox machine.
Xerox is a company that makes photocopiers, or at least they used to.
In any case, there's a problem here.
The boss says there are now 16 of these copiers in the office.
Jenny says no one did.
Clearly, wires got crossed somewhere.
To say that your wires got crossed is an old expression, meaning there was some sort of mistake, but it was due to some misunderstanding, some miscommunication, and no one is really at fault.
That's the idea.
No one is really to blame.
This probably comes from the old days when telephone lines would get connected accidentally to each other.
Perhaps
I don't know.
And you would hear someone else's communication.
Well, here the wires got crossed and they did not communicate properly.
Jenny says, I'll try to get to the bottom of this.
But the copiers will be removed before lunch.
She's going to get rid of or remove the copy machines before lunchtime.
She's also going to get to the bottom of this.
That expression.
To get to the bottom of something means to research and investigate something to find the real reason, the real explanation.
When you find out about a problem and it seems complicated and you don't know the reason for the problem, you might use this expression
I'm going to get to the bottom of this issue, why my car wasn't finished on time.
I'm going to talk to the mechanic.
I'm going to talk to the mechanic's boss and so forth.
I'm going to research, investigate till I find an answer.
The boss says, I can't even walk to my office with all of these machines in here.
You see, Jenny is trying to make her boss happy, but the boss keeps talking about the problem.
If he stopped talking, maybe he would get some work done.
Right, Jenny?
Am I right?
Exactly.
Anyway, Jenny says I'm looking for the purchase order right now to see if the mistake was on our end or on their end.
A purchase order is a document used in businesses to that are buying something from another business.
And they say, well, here's our order.
Here's what we want.
And a purchase order is considered official approval.
It's almost like a contract that says we will pay you this amount of money if you give us these things.
The person who sells things to a company is called a vendor.
Usually the purchase order has a number on it, and that's how they keep track of it.
That's how they know which order it was.
Jenny says that she's going to look at the purchase order for the copiers to see if the mistake was on our end.
On our end means if it was our responsibility, if it was something that the company did.
Instead of on their end, which would be the seller or the vendor, it was their mistake.
The boss says, let me know as soon as you figure it out.
That is, as soon as you understand and solve this problem.
I want to know who's responsible for this.
Who's responsible means who is the person who was in charge and therefore, if something goes wrong, has to take the blame.
That is, has to accept the responsibility.
Yes, it was my fault.
For example...
In a marriage, it's always the husband who is responsible for any problems or any mistakes.
And if you understand that, gentlemen, your life will be much easier.
Well, Jenny is trying to understand who's responsible for this error.
She says, right, I'll let you know.
No doubt it was just a clerical error.
Clerical refers to doing paperwork, adding numbers, typing.
These are all considered clerical tasks.
A clerical error means it's an unimportant error caused by someone who wasn't paying attention.
They didn't mean to make a mistake.
It was just like a small accident.
That's why Jenny says, no harm, no foul.
This expression is used when we recognize that something bad has happened, but it isn't very serious.
For example, you're driving and you stop at a stop sign and a car behind you bumps you hits you very lightly.
You get out.
You see that he did hit you, but there doesn't appear to be any problem with your car.
There's no damage. you might say, well, okay, no harm, no foul.
Yes, you hit me, but there isn't any serious damage, and therefore it's no big deal.
The boss doesn't like this attitude by Jenny.
He says, no harm, no foul.
This screw-up has cost me half a day's productivity.
A screw-up is a noun.
It can also be a verb, to screw up.
As a noun, it means a bad mistake.
As a verb, it means to make a bad mistake, something that has consequences, that is, something that does cause some damage, some problems.
The problem here, the boss says, is that it has cost him a half a day's productivity.
Productivity is the amount of work that you can complete in a certain period of time.
And it's used generally here to mean getting a lot of things done.
By the way, I should mention, the word screw has a number of different meanings in English, not all of which are covered in our learning guide for this episode.
The boss says I think that's plenty of harm done, meaning yes, there was harm because of this mistake.
Jenny says, you're right, sir.
Notice she calls him sir.
He's angry.
She's trying to show respect to him.
She says, I stand corrected.
This is a common expression.
I stand.
Corrected means that you recognize that what you said was wrong and that the other person is right.
So the husband says to the wife Honey, my dear, I think we need to go to my brother's house tonight.
And the wife says, Oh, no.
I told you I'm not going, remember?
And the husband, who of course doesn't remember, says, oh, yes, I remember.
I stand corrected.
You see how that works?
Okay, good.
Well, that's how it works with Jenny and her boss.
She says, I'm sure it was just an honest mistake.
An honest mistake is an error that was made by accident.
It wasn't someone trying to cause problems.
It was just one of those things that happened by accident.
The.
To make excuses means to give a reason or an explanation for why something happened, usually because you want to avoid the other person getting angry or you don't want to be punished yourself.
To make excuses is to say well okay yes, I made a mistake, but the reason was because my friend told me something that wasn't true.
And then I talked to my other friend and she said, and so forth.
You're trying to give reasons why you made your mistake to make you seem less guilty.
Well, that's what the boss does not want Jenny to do.
She is making excuses, he says, for this debacle.
Debacle, D-E-B-A-C-L-E, is a huge failure, a serious problem caused by some big mistake.
Then the boss says, Jenny, why are you making excuses for the person responsible?
Jenny says trying to change the subject, trying to get the boss to think about something else, says you look thirsty.
I'll go get you some coffee right now.
This is something that an employee might do for their boss to try to make the boss happy.
Of course we suspect that Jenny made the mistake and that's why she's trying to We would use the expression play it down.
That is not make a big deal of it.
Say that it is no big deal, it wasn't important, and so forth.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
What is going on here?
There was a miscommunication.
A miscommunication?
There are 16 copiers in this office.
Who ordered 16 copiers?
No one did.
Clearly wires got crossed somewhere.
I'll try to get to the bottom of this, but the copiers will be removed before lunch.
I can't even walk to my office with all these machines in here.
How am I supposed to get any work done?
I'm looking for the purchase order right now to see if the mistake was on our end or on their end.
Let me know as soon as you figure it out.
I want to know who's responsible for this.
Right.
I'll let you know.
No doubt it was just a clerical error.
No harm, no foul.
No harm, no foul?
This screw-up has cost me half a day's productivity.
I think that's plenty of harm done.
You're right, sir.
I stand corrected.
I'm sure it was just an honest mistake.
Stop making excuses for the person responsible for this debacle.
Jenny, why are you making excuses for the person responsible?
You look thirsty.
I'll go get you some coffee right now.
The person responsible for the scripts for this episode is the one and only Dr. Lucy Saye.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us again here on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2011 by the Center for Educational Development.
