IT PAYS TO LISTEN

After my early morning swim today, I was looking forward to sitting in the sauna and then relaxing in the spa pool. But only one of those things happened. When I got to the spa pool, there were two women and three workmen standing around it. They were talking and looking into it, but the pool was empty. I don’t mean there were no people in the pool; the pool was empty because there was no water in it.

So I went into the sauna. It was empty, too, because I was the only one there. I sat on the top bench, enjoying the heat and the quiet. But one of those things didn’t last long. Another man came in, and he was muttering under his breath. He wasn’t talking to me, but he wanted me to hear. As he sat down on the bench below me, he muttered “hopeless … useless!”. He wasn’t happy, and he told me why. I didn’t want to hear, but I couldn’t just leave.

Here’s why he was unhappy. Apparently, a pipe was leaking, and the workers were going to fix it and replace the tiles. The man was upset because the spa pool had been closed a short time before this because of another leak. This time the spa pool was going to be closed for a week. That’s what the man told me anyway.

When he shut up, I started thinking about that first word that he said: hopeless. Hopeless describes someone who has no hope, for example starving people looking for food, or people in a similar serious situation. 

But that’s not what this man meant. He meant that the five people standing around the pool and talking about the problem were hopeless, in other words, they were no good at their job. He was blaming them for the problem. So the two words that the man used (hopeless and useless) meant the same thing.

So maybe you’ve learned another meaning for hopeless in spoken English. And that’s why today’s story is called It Pays to Listen. You can learn lots of good spoken English by simply listening to people on the bus or train or in the supermarket.

Usually, when you pay, you give someone money, but in the phrase “it pays to …”, it just means it’s a good idea. For example, “it pays to look both ways before crossing the road”, or “it pays to shop around before buying something”.

I hope you found this story useful.