[ul]
[li]I live in the United States[/li][li]My surname is the most common surname in the United States[/li][li]I speak clearly and enunciate well, I have worked professionally as a voice artist[/ul][/li]
This morning I called my doctors office to make an appointment. (Edited to comply with HIIPA regulations.)
Receptionist ®: Good morning, doctors office.
Me: Good morning, I would like to make an appointment.
R: Last name please.
Me: Smith
R: I’m sorry, what was that?
Me: Smith
R: Is that with an ‘F’?
Me: No - Smith
R: F as in Frank?
Me: No, S as in Sam.
R: Could you spell it for me?
etc.
What the fuck?
Judging by the receptionists voice, they appeared to be youngish, so I would discount deafness. There was no background noise on my end, and I wasn’t picking up any on their end. Their office is usually rather quiet.
Do people really make it to adulthood now-a-days without being exposed to the last name Smith as a common name? So that when they hear it they act as if it’s terribly exotic and foreign and hard to understand, like M’Balia or Upuriasukul?
Here’s where I fall into the muck -
Y’know, where I live (Southern California) I understand that this name may not be the most common. I actually run into this problem frequently when calling to businesses. I excuse the problem when it appears that I have contacted an offshore call center, Smith is not at all common in Bangalore. But when I call a local business and detect a hint of an accent, a noticable percentage of time I’m going to go through this same shit!
I have worked on the phones for 15 years. Every now and then, a voice or an accent just doesn’t register with you. It may with everyone else, but not with you right then.
I once had a caller from Ireland. I swear I couldn’t understand anything she said. I asked her to spell her name for me and I couldn’t understand any of it. I had to pass it off to a co-worker. Her heard her fine.
She was probably mainlining some really good drugs at the time. They have those available at a doctor’s office.
I work tech support. Sometimes we get a nice clear voice with great enunciation and I can tell every letter they’re saying when they give me their product serial number. The rest of the time, bcdegptvz all sound exactly alike. The worst are the people who get pissed when you ask them to repeat it or when you read it back with phoenetics (ie, “Z as in Zulu?”)
Then I get the people I can’t hear for shit. I even tell them that I’m having a very hard time hearing them and ask them to speak up, and then it’s like they purposely set down the phone and walk away from it and I can’t hear a damned thing they say.
All I can say is, next time they ask you to spell Smith, say “G-O-N-Z-A-L-E-Z”.
Then when she calls you Gonzalez, say “No, that’s SMITH!”
I get similarly peeved when people misspell my last name, too. It has two n’s together, which makes a fairly common last name. If you put two m’s in for the two n’s, you get a name that no one has. Common sense would dictate that my name is probably the common one, not the one that is gibberish, but no, people do not get that far in their logic. Oh well. It’s better than my maiden name, which no one had ever heard of and people spelled extremely creatively.
With all due respect, did you even read my post? I am US native born and speak with no accent. I don’t whisper or drawl, there is no patois or garbling, I project and enunciate. If someone can’t understand me when I speak then (english language) television must really be a bitch.
Indeed! I have a 16 year old. She used to speak clearly, but over the last few years her local teen culture has required her to ‘mush it up’.
Somewhat tangential, but some years ago I was briefly hospitalized for knee surgery.
After the surgery, a hospital employee (not a physician or nurse, more like an orderly) brought me a pair of crutches. He introduced himself. He had a Hispanic last name. I addressed him as Mr. “Name” but apparently anglicized the pronunciation. Not surprising, since English is my first (and only fluent) language. He corrected me a bit snarkily on my pronunciation, and then got positively huffy when I tried again and didn’t do much better.
I had to laugh when I got a closer look at the crutches. He’d written my name on them with a Sharpie. Let’s say my name is McKinney. He’d spelled it “MAQUINI”.
My surname has over fifty entries under places in the United Kingdom in its Wikipedia disambiguation page, yet I still have to spell and correct it over and over. I wonder how these people cope with map indexes. Then there’s my first name, too. Yes, it’s pronounced how I just said it. You don’t need to sound quizzical as you repeat it.
I have a German last name and a slight lisp. That makes saying F, S, and Z fun times for me, especially since my last name begins with one of those letters. It’s constantly misspelled by companies I do business with over the phone unless I resort to phonetics.
Don’t even get me started on my first name. No one pronounces my first name right. I’ve given up that battle.
