Gems of Wisdom: Rubbish

Tuesday 10th May 2011

Claiming something I said was rubbish

Colleague: "Gobswallop."
Me: "Godswallop? Don’t you mean codswallop?"
C: "No! Gobswallop!"
M: "Ah I thought you were saying GODswallop. Still, you mean codswallop, right?"
C: "No, the term's gobswallop!"
M: "Bless. No, it’s codswallop."
C: "No! It’s gobswallop!"
M: "It’s not, it’s cod, as in the fish. Codswallop."
C: "I’ve been saying gobswallop all my life! You’re wrong!"
M: "I’m not."

I then sent her an email with links to the search results from Google for both gobswallop and codswallop. Her version returns 4 hits. Codswallop returns at least 138,000 hits.

Gems of Wisdom: Introduction

In my position as a call centre monkey, I had the pleasure of working with a woman a few years younger than me. I have said, and she fully agreed with me, that she didn’t seem to have anything stopping her from speaking exactly what she was thinking at a given moment in time.

Sometimes a gem occurred as she was thinking out loud, and I had absolutely no input into the stream of consciousness. If a gem occurred as part of a conversation, the gem was written as a conversation.

Disclaimer: The subject of these posts has given me full permission to publish these excerpts from our conversations.