
“So, I had a one night stand the other night,” says my friend Hayley.
“Oh,” I say. “Was it good?”
“It was okay. Actually, it was a bit embarrassing, really.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“Well, in the morning, I woke up before him yeah? And I lay there, next to him, waiting for him to wake up. Only I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what his name was.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“So I was lying there, trying to figure out what to do. Like, I couldn’t ask him, could I? I couldn’t just come straight out and ask him. ‘Hi, that was great last night, what’s your name again?’ So I thought what I should do was, like, get up and go through his jacket and find his Personalausweis. But what if he woke up and saw me rifling through his pockets like a junkie whore type person? I didn’t want that to happen.”
“It would be slightly humiliating, I’ll give you that.”
“So then I thought to myself: Hayley – you’re an English teacher! You can just elicit his name! I mean, it’s one of the advantages of being a TEFL teacher, right – being so good at eliciting stuff. So I lay there, while he slept, and I made a plan. Like a mini lesson plan, in my head. And when he woke up, I said to him: ‘My name is Hayley – and my dad calls me Hales. It’s like a nickname. Do you have a nickname?'”
“Sneaky. And kind of genius. What did he say?”
“He said: ‘Well, not really. You can’t really make a nickname out of Jörg.”
“Bingo!”
“I mean, thank God I’m a TEFL teacher. It could’ve been a really unbearably embarrassing situation, otherwise.”