The FU itself wasn't today but I only realized my FU today.
About a year and a half ago, my friend visited Japan, our native country, and stayed at my apartment for a couple of weeks. She was born here but grew up mostly in the US and Australia, and at the time of the visit was on vacation from university in the states.
During her stay, she kept turning off the foyer lights every time we went out. This isn't necessary since it turns on and off automatically with a motion sensor. The first time she turned it off manually, I asked her why and she told me that her parents were always on her case about these things so it turned into a habit. I thought this was a bit extreme, but it's just a light switch so why not.
Then, at the end of her stay, she mentioned off-handedly that she never worked out how to use my microwave. Which felt strange since it was a standard microwave, nothing out of the ordinary. But our conversation moved on to the next topic, and eventually I forgot about it.
So she went back to the states, I turned the switch back to auto, never thought about it again, and life went on. Fast forward a year and a half, the lightbulb in question went out for the first time since I moved in, and to change the bulb I turned it off. That was when I had a—this time figurative—"lightbulb" moment. It all made sense. She couldn't read it.
Her main language, and the language we communicate in, is English, but I've heard her Japanese on some occasions as well and she's mostly native. However, it never occurred to me that her reading and writing may not be up to par. (In Japanese we have quite a few kanji characters we need to know to be fully literate, so it takes some conscious effort if you're educated abroad. Hard to learn, easy to forget. If you don't see it daily.) You can get around well enough in the city with just English. There are English signs in public transport, restaurants we went to had menus in English etc. Besides, I knew she knew some basic kanji.
The switch in question has three settings: on, auto, and off. The on and off are very simple (入 and 切 respectively), but the auto is a bit trickier (自動). Easy enough that if you live here you'll pick it up, but she was only here for a short time. Of course, there are ways to look it up or Google lens it, but it's natural not to give it much thought if it's just a light switch and you recognize "on" and "off". Come to think of it, she did struggle with some difficult kanji, like names of places, but I assumed she simply wasn't used to irregular kanji use in proper nouns.
Anyway, it's still a hypothetical until she tells me or there's some other conclusive evidence. It seems like an insensitive question to pose considering she hasn't volunteered the information in my many years of knowing her. As long as there's no rational need to know, I don't think I ever will ask.
Maybe it wasn't not much of a story, but it was a huge eureka moment in my otherwise mundane day to day, and I just wanted to share somewhere. 🤷🏻♀️
TL;DR My friend stayed at my place for two weeks and kept manually turning off a sensor-activated light switch. Today as I was changing the bulb, I realized it was probably because she couldn't read the writing on the switch.
