At a pizza restaurant in Apex, N.C., a kitchen worker recently asked cook Doug Martin for a jar of tomato sauce. “We don’t have potatoes here,” Mr. Martin replied.
What did you say?
--Later, Mr. Martin heard the shift manager ask if he could sing. The question made little sense—until he noticed the manager was at the fryer. She had actually asked Mr. Martin to fry up some chicken wings.
The miscommunications had a common culprit: The masks the workers are wearing now. “Everyone’s having trouble hearing each other,” says Mr. Martin, 19 years old. “We’re all screaming constantly.”
Count the ability to understand each other during routine, personal interactions as yet another challenge of the coronavirus crisis. The masks, while an important safeguard against the spread of the virus, not only muffle sounds but also cover up much of the facial expression people normally use to interpret meaning.
Doug Martin misunderstood co-workers wearing masks.
Photo: Doug MartinTori Palmer-Kern was paying for groceries at a supermarket when she thought she heard the clerk—masked and standing behind a plexiglass shield—compliment her handbag. “I went into this story about how I bought it online and they sent me the wrong color,” says Ms. Palmer-Kern, a 30-year-old project manager for a market-research firm in Minneapolis.
The clerk responded with some brief muffled sounds Ms. Palmer-Kern couldn’t make out. Now she’s not sure whether the clerk had praised the handbag at all. “She might have been smiling but I don’t know, so I just said thank you and left,” she says.
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At a farmers market in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Evan Williams assumed a masked cashier had asked him if he wanted a receipt. He said he didn’t and left, but while getting into his car, the cashier suddenly appeared again. “She’s looking angry, with very creased eyebrows,” he said.
Mr. Williams, a 37-year-old freelance journalist, asked what the problem was, but he couldn’t make out the cashier’s response. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I really have no idea what you’re saying,’ ” he recalled. The cashier tried again but Mr. Williams still couldn’t understand her, so she stepped back and removed her mask. It turned out that his electronic payment hadn’t gone through. “I was embarrassed because I go there fairly often,” Mr. Williams said.
In Brooklyn, N.Y., Kate Amrine inadvertently caused offense at a laundromat. The 27-year-old musician was waiting outside the building in hopes that someone would open the door because her hands were full. When a woman did just that, Ms. Amrine thanked her, but the do-gooder didn’t hear the words of appreciation. Both women were wearing masks.
Kate Amrine was wearing a face mask when she thanked a woman for holding the door open at laundromat, but the woman didn't hear her.
Photo: Ford Fourqurean“You’re so ungrateful,” Ms. Amrine recalls hearing the woman growl. “I felt bad. I would never not say thank you.”
About half of the average person’s ability to read facial emotions comes from observing the mouth, nose and chin, according to Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The eyes and eyebrows make up the rest.
Using arm gestures, raising your eyebrows and accentuating your vocal tone can make it easier to convey meaning while wearing a face mask, said Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, an English professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “If we’re mindful of other modes of communication, it gives us more ways to express ourselves,” she said. “Part of the communication exchange means we also have to practice looking for those other cues.”
But new habits can take time to form, so for now many people are playing guessing games.
Face masks turned what should have been a brief interaction at a food store into an Abbott and Costello-like routine for Jen Estill, principal of a branding agency in Lansing, Mich. When the mask-wearing cashier asked if she wanted to pay with debit or credit, Ms. Estill, also wearing a mask, replied, “Pardon me?” She heard back, “Excuse me?”
“It turned into a two-minute back and forth conversation,” said Ms. Estill, 47, who was just looking to quickly buy a plant for a friend in mourning. “It was one of those ‘Who’s On First?’ situations.”
While shopping at a Target store in East Brunswick, N.J., Stacey Bender was approached by a man wearing a face mask with a skeleton grin design on it. The stranger seemed to be asking Ms. Bender a question but she couldn’t understand him clearly. “He kept repeating it and got louder and louder,” said Ms. Bender, who is 60 and owns a marketing firm. “He finally stormed off.”
In hindsight, she thinks he may have been asking her where she got the pack of toilet paper that was on the top of her shopping cart. “He probably couldn’t find it,” she said. “I had a hard time finding it.”
Chris Matule is an American living in Austria, but even with his New Jersey accent he has never had a problem conveying his order to his local butcher—until he started wearing a face mask. Recently, he went in to order a half kilo of mixed pork and beef, and was handed a full kilo instead.
“I just sort of went with it,” says Mr. Matule, 39. “I went home and doubled everything in the recipe I was making. I had two pots going at the same time.”
Chris Matule was handed a full kilo of meat at a butcher shop when the clerk misheard him under his mask.
Photo: Chris MatuleWrite to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
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