Originally Posted by TransWorld

My first experience like this was in high school in America. Had a French foreign exchange student. He learned British English.

An early exam, he leaned over to a girl next to him and asked, “Do you have a rubber I can borrow?”

She was stunned, and asked, “Right here, right now?”

“Yes, I desperately need to use a rubber, right here, right now.”

“What? As she turned beet red, he began to realize a communication problem.

“I made a mistake, I need to use a rubber to rub out my pencil writing.”

“Oh, we call them erasers. Sure, here is my eraser.”

After class they chatted and had a good laugh.

(He now lives in Switzerland and is in the export/import business. I keep in touch with him on FB.)