This is one of those unusual tales that doesn’t involve me. It was funny enough, however, that I thought it was worth telling secondhand… I hope you agree.

The other day, my wife took C to the audiologist to get a hearing test. Because she had his younger brother with him, she wasn’t able to go into the testing room with him. Instead they stayed outside the door, listening. From their listening point, she couldn’t really hear C – just the tester.

I’ll skip over the bulk of the exam to the end of the test when she heard the audiologist say: “Okay, now I’m going to say a word and you repeat after me.”

There was a pause, presumably while C was answering, and then the audiologist started saying words separated by pauses: “airplane,” pause “cloud”, pause, and so forth.

After a while she said in a much louder voice, ”Okay, great!”

There was another pause and then she said “Oh, okay.”  A few seconds later, she said “Darth Vader,” and then another pause, and then she was back into her pattern of words followed by pauses. This time, however, the words were markedly different.

When they came out of the room, she (the audiologist) was smiling. “That’s the first time anyone’s ever done that.”

My wife was, as you probably are now, confused. “What?”

“After we were done, he said it was my turn to repeat after him.”

Now there’s a concept we should all embrace! The next time you go to the doctor (or better yet, the dentist) insist on taking turns. That’ll probably drastically reduce the amount of poking and prodding you have to endure.