This has to be one of the singularly most disturbing things ever. No, for real. I was round at a friend's house the other day, when he got a phone call telling him that his nephew was going to come visit for a bit. At which point I get a bit nervous because I'm really, really bad with kids, so anyhow, given my friend is 19, I assume (somewhat understandably?) that this is likely to be a small child of some description. Anyway a half hour later or so the doorbell goes, and there's this heavily bearded guy who looks in his twenties and asks "Hi, is my uncle in?", understandably I assume he's meaning my friend's father and say that he's at work. At which point I get a very confused look and he says 'I phoned just a bit earlier and he said to come by'. At which point I manage to give the hallway carpet a good coffee-watering, and then find myself laughing quite uncontrollably whenever he said the words "uncle Matthew", which unfortunately turned out to be every few sentences.

Which anyway, leads me to the points of:

1) Why the hell do people ever ask questions that they know the answer to? It happens all the time, and annoys me no end. "Is my uncle in?", "No", "Yes he is." Well if you know, why the hell are you asking me?

2) What's more creepy than this? I mean if you're going to have weird family issues like this you could at least be decent about it and avoid using family terms. There's something inherently disturbing about seeing a man refer to someone who pretty much only started to go through puberty last week as their uncle.