Ey Up, Lad. Tha’ dunt se much, do tha’?

My husband, Jose is a pretty gregarious sort. He’s witty and interesting and therefore easy to take out in public. So when my mother and Sid, my late stepfather came here for Christmas the first year we were together, I was looking forward to them meeting him, and being suitably impressed.

“Awright, Ozie,” said Sid, shaking Jose’s hand warmly. I had spent the past several months coaching my mother over the phone to get her to pronounce Jose as Ho-say and not Jo-zee. Although I convinced them that the J was pronounced as an h, no amount of cajoling could get either of them to put the emphasis on the second syllable, and the letter h had never been uttered from Sid’s mouth in his life.

The four of us sat around and made conversation. Sid soon made himself feel at home and started in on some of his stories. He told the one about the day he drove home in fog so thick he couldn’t see the front of the car’s hood and ended up driving down the sidewalk. What he actually said was along the lines of “Fog wa’ that thick, I coont see’t end o’t’ bonnet. Nex’ thing I know, I’m on t’ causeway.”

I laughed and my mother gasped in shock, I think more in surprise that he’d survived as long as he had. Jose however, sat there staring blankly at Sid. I caught his eye and grinned, trying to pull him into the conversation, but he just gazed back at me. I frowned. This was no way to make a good impression on your future in-laws. He could at least put in a little effort to join in and endear himself to them. Perhaps, I thought, now he had seen where I descended from, he had changed his mind about our future together. I was slightly worried, but frankly, even more upset with him for being so rude.

It was somewhere in the middle of one of Sid’s stories about his long time friend and cycling partner, Billy, that the penny dropped for me. Jose didn’t understand a single word that Sid was saying. That disassociated frown on his face was in fact a look of concentration. “He may as well have been speaking Chinese,” he said to me later that night.

It was Churchill who once said we are “two nations divided by a common language.” How right he was. After 13 years here my once strong Yorkshire accent has softened considerably. It’s now what most of relatives would describe as “posh” and the rest would say is definitely American. Still, there are times that no matter how hard I try I cannot make myself understood. My greatest challenge seems to be in ordering water in a restaurant. I say war-ta, but what I need to try and say is wodder, or wawder, or something like that. It’s virtually impossible. Another favorite is the old Khakis/car keys, which apparently to my husband’s ears sound exactly the same.

Jacques Chirac allegedly stomped out when it was suggested that a meeting be conducted in the language of business, i.e. English. That’s all well and good if everyone around the table speaks the same version of English, but even in England you only have to travel to the next county to hear English spoken in a different dialect and with words unique to that region.

Perhaps we should all learn sign language, but even that has its issues. It would be all well and good until someone asked for two of something and caused the British delegation to leave in a huff.


In Memory of Sid
July 27, 1932 - March 18, 2004
It were 'ilarious.

Do Not Call

“Have you every wondered why God allows suffering?” asked the woman who introduced herself to me as Ingrid. In light of the state of the world today, I have wondered often, but at that exact moment my more pressing concern was why God allows telemarketers. Ingrid was my third that day and I’m still not sure what she was selling.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been my most frequent caller to-date—he of course was a recording (not that I’m sure I would be able to tell the difference). He didn’t call me on this particular day, but Yellow Pages did. They wanted to verify my listing information and as a valued customer, offer me a free business ad for month, after which $29.99 would miraculously appear on my phone bill each month until I spent half a day on the phone trying to get through to the right department to cancel it.

Equally appreciative of my business were National Geographic, who expressed their thanks for my renewed subscription by selling me a series of DVDs which will undoubtedly show up in my mail box from this day forward, ‘til death do us part at which point my next of kin will get to deal with trying to make them stop. Somewhere out in List Company land, my name is flagged with an “S” for sucker. I’m pretty sure that I signed myself up for the business ad and the DVDs, so perhaps I only have myself to blame.

My weakness for telemarketers is a two-fold issue: Firstly, I’m British and rudeness--or assertiveness of any kind for that matter--does not flow freely through my veins. My second issue is that I’ve been there. During a dark (I think it’s safe to say the darkest) period of my life, I found myself between jobs, between husbands and consequently between roofs over my head, so in a fit of desperation, I took a job as a telemarketer. My particular line was long-distance phone service--the nemesis of all quiet family dinners. For several months I sat in a three by two kiosk in a huge windowless room on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and tried to convince East Coasters that they couldn’t live without these services. Needless to say, while the top salesman regularly went home with several thousand dollars in his pocket, I soon adapted to life on minimum wage.

While location dictated that most of my co-workers were actors and musicians who worked the morning shift to keep their afternoons free for auditions and mailing out of headshots, many of them were single parents or students, just trying to keep food on the table and gas in the car. For some, it was the first of two or three jobs they would go to that day.

So, when one of these people calls me in the comfort of my own home it’s hard for me to take affront with them personally. On the other hand, there’s nothing more aggravating than having a crucial scene in a novel or a pleasant dinner at home interrupted by the breath-free monotony of a sales script.

After trying the tactic of waiting for a break in the monologue to jump in and say “No, thank you,” I soon realized it wasn’t going to work. I did once try just hanging up, but I felt so awful afterwards I didn’t try it again. However, as a former insider, I do know of one Achilles heel in the telemarketer’s role—the customer status flag.

The job of the telemarketer is two-fold: to make the sale and to create a viable list of live ones. After every call, the status is noted: hang up, answering machine, call back later, not interested. All these denote a live body and keep the recipient firmly on the list. The only status that would prevent another call is “I” for Irate. This is reserved for those dreaded customers who yell “Don’t call again,” interspersed with various expletives and culminating with a solid slamming down of the phone.

Now, getting irate with every telemarketer who calls me is only going to give me wrinkles, so my new tactic is this: calmly and politely explain to the caller that I am not irate, yet, but I will be if I get another call from them or anyone else, so if they would kindly mark me as irate, we can all just get on with our lives, without one another.

That’s my plan and I think it’s a good one, providing I can get a word in edgewise. Of course, I could always just put myself on the “Do Not Call” list, but then what would I have to write about?