This reminds me of a statistics class I had in college. The teacher was a “feriner” and it was funny to watch the entire class lean forward everytime a word couldn’t be understood.
But to the Op. Ask the qestion in a thick accent and you’ll get handed off to someone who can undestand YOU.
Right, because not understanding someone with a thick accent = racist. :rolleyes:
You’ve got to be joking?
If you’re serious, I can only surmise that you’ve been lucky in that none of your clients have complained to you (directly). Foreign call centers are so often incomprehensible that it’s become something of a cultural meme to joke about them. You must’ve had personal experience with that too, if you ever had to call a help line?
**What would YOU do? **
Study, work hard, and get good enough grades that you don’t end up in a Community College in your 50s.
Right, because “White” = “Speaks American English clearly” :rolleyes:
Do you know why people in the OP’s part of the country have to say things like “ink pen” whereas most other Americans do not? It’s because if they don’t add “ink”, then to everyone else it sounds like they’re talking about one half of “pins and needles.”
Hopefully our OP won’t get a white person with the North Texas speech impediment.
Yeah, I had that happen the last three times I called XBox support. Latching onto a keyword is NOT good enough.
But then, I’m a white* person with a North Texas speech impediment. My fellow Merkins seem to be able to understand me just fine, except for my cousins in New England.
*According to my mother’s father, though, I’m only half white. Seems that Italians and Sicilians aren’t really white in his book.
This is not an accent problem though. I encounter it often enough in people who speak perfect Briswegian.
I must have missed this episode of Community.
Anyway, the thing to say is, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t understand what my tutor is saying and she often misunderstands the questions I ask. Is there another tutor I could be assigned to?’
It shouldn’t be hard to imagine that someone who learned English as a second language and takes a little effort to understand would have a harder time being understand by someone who speaks with a different regional accent than they learned. If they learned English with a mid-western or (God forbid*) New England accent, someone who speaks with a Southern accent is two accents away, and will have a harder time understanding.
(*) Right, for the humor impaired among us, that’s a joke.
…
This isn’t nice at all. I hate ugliness like this.
My cousins not only have a different accent, but they use different words, too! I’ll never forget when we visited them, (I was a preteen at the time) and I was advised not to wear my dungarees somewhere. Since I didn’t know that I even HAD any dungarees, I thought that it would be no problem. I went and put on a pair of jeans, which upset the adult who had told me not to wear dungarees.
This.
If you have questions about code, just ask us.
I cannot believe people’s bowels are loosening over the OP. The thread title is mainly a joke. I clicked on it wondering why the hell he would need to speak to white people exclusively as well, then read the post and saw that’s not what the thread is about at all. I thought it was pretty funny, but apparently the most racist thing you can ever do is have a hard time understanding poor and/or heavily accented English.
Pet peeve.
I occasionally buy Unistrut. It’s a U shaped metal channel and an associated line of connectors and hangers, used in construction. The problem is that it’s commonly used by several different trades and every large hardware store stocks it in a different place - even different stores in the same chain.
So every time I go into one of these stores, I have to try to find the one employee who has heard the word “Unistrut” before. Everyone else, I have to physically describe the product and studiously avoid mentioning any of the keywords “plumbing” “electrical” or “hardware” because the clueless employee will immediately parrot back the first keyword they hear and claim it’s in that area, wasting my time. If I don’t find the one clued in employee, I have to thoroughly check five or more potential areas (once, it was stocked right next to the gardening department).
That might confuse any historically conscious customer service rep in India who may think you are asking for someone who is ethnically Persian.
…when I used to work in a call center I had a customer who was from “Ia-yo-wa” (Iowa) and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what he was saying. I was able to decipher that he had some problem with some issue about his phone. I just said “yes, sir” and cold-transferred him to another department…
…Yes, I know I’m evil.
I’m sorry Iowa man… I hope you found a better listener, then myself, in escalations…
A long time ago when I was working at a family-owned restaurant at a small airport, we’d often get American tourists coming in. The owner hired a lot of immigrants to work the kitchen and mostly kept fluent English speakers (like me, who is Asian by ethnicity, but grew up culturally Canadian) in the front. Sometimes, we’d be short on front counter staff and the ESL workers would come out to help out. One day, my co-worker was dealing with a guy and it looked like she was having a little trouble understanding him. She waved me over to help out. He took a look at me and said “You better talk good English!” and I responded with “Yes sir. I speak English very well.”
No, it will confuse them because chances are they self-identify as Aryan.