Miscommunication can lead to a lot of problems where one person assumes one thing, and another person assumes something else.

What’s even worse is when there’s a lack of communication and one person assumes something is true that isn’t true at all due to a lack of information.

In today’s story, one mom fails to tell her child an important piece of information, yet she blames them for making the wrong assumption. Now the child is wondering if they really are incompetent.

Let’s read the whole story to find out what happened.

AITA My mom called me incompetent

My mom just called me incompetent.

For context we’re building a set of bedrooms in the basement for me, and my older brother and my mom is taking our old room.

My mom decided to put in egress windows, the one in my room is completely below ground.

That creates a problem, but they found a solution.

Due to the window well not having any drainage we have had to use a sump pump that we plug in whenever it rains.

The cord is too short to reach the outlet from outside so we use an extension cord/surge protector.

When it was still our room the surge protector was plugged into the wall and the sump pump cord was plugged into that when we needed to use it.

However my mom just recently moved into that room with a brand new bed, which will he important in a moment, and decided, without telling us, that the pump should always be plugged into the extension cord and have the extension cord need to be plugged in.

Mom had a request that was more confusing than it should have been.

It was raining really hard last night and she told me to go plug the sump pump in.

I saw that it was plugged into the extension cord and therefore assumed it was plugged in, as it has ALWAYS been on when plugged into the extension cord for as long as I used it. I thought someone else had noticed the rain and decided to plug in the pump.

But no she wanted me to reach into the gap between her matress and the wall and plug the extension cord in.

I have had 0 experience with that bed frame and didn’t even know there was an opening in it there.

Does she think they’re mind readers?

However today she brought it up in the car ride home.

She called me incompetent and implied I should have known nobody went into her room to plug it in.

She made the decision to plug it in differently on her own and didn’t inform us and yet was mad at me for not knowing her decision.

It was a misunderstanding due to a lack of communication on the mom’s part. She can’t expect her kids to know what she changed unless she tells them.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person thinks the mom is the one who messed up.

Another person thinks the whole sump pump setup is a problem.

This person thinks OP should’ve spoken up instead of assuming someone else plugged it in.

This person thinks OP really is at fault.

A little communication can make a big difference.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.