Get the passport, honey, we're going to Connecticut

So, I’m on the phone with Cingular wireless about these $20 in roaming charges that apeared on my bill this month. As I have a national plan, there should be no roaming charges. The customer service rep tells me " The only reason you should have roaming charges is if you called out of the country, have you called any place like, Connecticut, that’s out of the country?" I had to use every ounce of my self control not to laugh out loud at her( not a good thing when you’re trying to get help from a person ) Connecticut??? WTF??? Dosen’t anybody know any basic geography anymore?

You filthy foreigners and your fart-ridden “cable-less” telephone devices.

We Connecticutters break wind in your presence.

we need more border guards.

Well sometimes the people that answer those customer service lines aren’t actually in the US, but a foreign country. Don’t know about Cingular though. Or maybe there’s a foreign place called Connecticut in another country. Like there’s Georgia in Russia.

As long as you don’t call New Mexico, you should be OK.

That reminds me of a particularly stupid conversation I had a while ago.

I’d like to know how this turned out, Weirddave.

There’s a former Soviet republic called Georgia, if that’s what you mean. Capital is Tblisi. It’s not in Russia, though.

I mean, as long as we’re making fun of Americans who don’t know their geography. :wink:

I read the thread title and thought, “Ginger needs to show her passport to travel between states? Where does she show it, the toll booths?”

I had my indignation all fired up and ready to go.

Then I find out it’s a wireless service rant. A snickering rant, no less.

Now I’m all fired up with no place to go. I guess I’ll just twiddle my thumbs and whistle.

I was living in Delaware, the state, not the city in Ohio, when I applied to a graduate school which shall remain nameless (UCLA), and they insisted I take the TOEFL test before I could apply – the exam what tests English as a second language…the lady thought Delaware was an island in the Caribbean…I ended up (for a year) at the University of Minnesota…where I was once asked if Delaware was the capital of Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc etc (to be fair, my own parents, living then in DE, weren’t sure what country Minnesota was in, Canada or the States…)

Then there was the time I tried to order breakfast in a restaurant in Atlanta, and the waitress could NOT understand my (English) accent…she finally asked the person I was with, ‘What’s wrong with her?’

He didn’t even look up from the menu, the prat, and replied off-handedly, ‘Oh, she’s from England.’

‘Oh…’ Long pause. ‘So, what language do they speak there?’

cheers!

Texas

Did she mean “out of the country”, or “out in the country”? Most peopele perceive Connecticut as being made up mostly of countryside. Maybe she just meant you got a roaming charge for being in the middle of nowhere, away from any cell towers. Just a thought.

No, it was clearly calling to another country.

<Mongomery Burns>

Whoa! There’s a New Mexico?

</Mongomery Burns>

That’s funny. Not the extra charges, but the woman on the phone. Reminds me of back during GW1, I heard some news stories about how there was a rare earthquake somewhere in the midwest… maybe it was Minnesota, I can’t really remember. But anyway, apparently there was a not insignificant number of people who were afraid they were being attacked by SCUD missles. I was willing to overlook the fact that a large amount of the populous might not realize that SCUD missles just didn’t have anywhere close to that kind of range, until the reported mentioned that apparently a lot of people thought Iraq occupied the space taken by Canada. sigh

I also had a lot of hassles when I was in Hawaii with service providers who would claim to be able to do ‘x’ for one rate, ANYWHERE in the country. Not the contiguous 48 states, but ANYWHERE.

“So you can ship that here for $x?”
“Anywhere in the country sir.”
“Even in Hawaii?”
“No, sir, anywhere in the COUNTRY”
“Last time I checked, Hawaii was a state”
“I’m sorry sir, but shipping to Hawaii will cost an extra $33,000 because we have to use the international rates”
“Bye”

Groan.

Not that I’m one of Cingular’s biggest fans, but a lot of companies are moving their call centers overseas to take advantage of cheap, educated labor. (This was on this morning’s Marketplace Morning Report, in fact.) So it’s possible that you were talking to someone who genuinely has no idea Connecticut is an American state.

Robin

maybe they’re educated, but this particular person didnt have common sense. I mean if I were to be doing customer service for, say, Elbonia, I would say something like “did you call anywhere like New York City”, some place i KNEW was out of the country, instead of a vaguely Elbonian-sounding name which may or may not be in the country.

Unless, of course, there IS a Connecticut elsewhere than in the US which blows my assertion out of the water.

Reminds me of a friend of mine. We were in a school trip to Iguazu Falls in the state of Misiones (north eastern, Argentina next to Brazil), so a girl says to my bright friend:

“Nice shirt, where did you buy it”

Bright friend answers:

“Far, far away in a country called AR GEN TI NA”.

Thank god we were able to get out alive, I learned that day that people that live in frontiers are a bit sensitive about geography.

It’s also possible that this was just a run of the mill brain fart. Maybe she meant to say “Canada” and got her wires crossed.

Don’t push it, Dave, they may start looking these things up and see that I pay domestic rates to call outside of Miami. Well. you can push it after we leave and return to the Good Ole’ U.S. of A.