My auntie-neighbour brought her young foreign relative over with a laptop and woke me up from my nap. She spoke to me in both Chinese mandarin and dialect. As the elderly was completely IT illiterate, I had problem understanding what they wanted.
After some time, I thought the little girl wanted me to change the setting for her in order to connect to the internet. So, I asked them in Chinese to confirm. The auntie, upon hearing the word “change”, kept telling me they didn’t want to change the hardware. Yet, she kept repeating “change” in dialect.
I explained to them that when I brought my laptop overseas, I needed not change the configuration, which I assumed laptops brought over from other countries, such as Indonesia, needed not any special configuration as well.
I asked the auntie if she had internet connection at home and she answered no. Alas, I guessed the little girl just wanted to tag onto my internet network. I explained to them that my wonderful M1 network was down and would be down for only-pig-knows-how-many-days and thus could not help the little girl.
The auntie simply replied “You don’t know then it’s okay” as usual.
In fact, when her relatives came over, my family was always more than happy to entertain them…
I wasn’t sure of her actual thought but it kind of sounded like I was either stupid or unfriendly.
I think if you don’t know what you really want or can’t explain the problem, you shouldn’t just blame or think lowly of the person who can’t understand what you want.