When my wife and I first got together my sister and her spent a lot of time together. One evening my sister mentioned that I used to set fire to stuff all the time when I was a kid and that I was a right little ‘pyro’.
A few years later I landed a great, new job with a big firm in London. A few weeks go by and she's met a couple of my colleagues a couple of times, so when an event dinner is organised with work I think ‘great, this'll be fun’.
It was a charity auction night. My table were pretty quiet, all the younger people in the firm, not lots of money to be bidding and so just sitting and chatting. About an hour into the night, there's a conversation around a big story in the paper about a pedophile snatching kids. She smiles at me, then she announces to the table: "Thom used to be a pedophile".
The quiet, accounting-type girls at the table went bright red, I went white and this one bloke was looking at me very aggressively.
I was totally lost and looked at her in disbelief. Trying to keep calm, I said "Where the did you get that idea, darling?"
"Your sister told me you were a pedophile when you were young".
It took about 5 minutes for me to calm down then I politely excused myself from the table, who didn't really want me there at that point, and called my sister to ask what the hell was going on.
She said "I said Pyro! As in pyromaniac. Pyromaniac! Not Pedo!!"
I went back to the table and tried to gently laugh it off with them all but things were never the same. For the rest of the dinner AND the rest of my time at the firm.
