dumbarse moment

15 Oct, 2026

"I just had a dumbarse moment" he said, by way of explanation as to why he was an hour late for lunch. I invited him to explain. He then went on a long-winded rant about how he'd tried to send a parcel to his brother in Shenzhen from our local post office in suburban Beijing, but they wouldn't accept addresses written in English, and they couldn't find anybody to translate for him, and so on, and so on...

Eventually he ran out of steam and I said:

"Baozi¹, you're the dumbarse."

The cognitive dissonance visibly shattered as he did a pretty good mime of somebody being punched repeatedly in quick succession on one cheek and the other.

Now that I had his attention, I explained.

Expecting a regular post office in suburban Beijing to have a translator on hand for you is as silly as expecting a Post Shop in Tawa to have a Chinese translator on hand. It's not beyond the realms of possibility, but consider your location and adjust your expectations accordingly.

And besides, although English is the most dominant official language, considering the location, if that post office needs to have translators on hand, they should also have Arabic, Russian, Korean, Japanese, French, etc, etc translators. You can see how this becomes unwieldy and uneconomical very quickly.

But also, you're trying to send a package within China. Of course the addresses need to be written in Chinese. Would you send a package from Wellington to Invercargill written in Chinese? No, to send a package from Wellington to Invercargill you'd be within your legal rights to have the addresses written in Te Reo Māori, but you'd most likely have them in English. Likewise for mailing things within China, the addresses need to be in Chinese.

Well, Baozi calmed down, we had some lunch, we figured out a way for his brother to send him his address in Chinese (should be easy enough with all the technology at our disposal, right?), and we got his parcel sent off.