Press 1 for English

Press 1 for English and be connected to someone who can't speak it anyway. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm tired of it. Before the 80s this never happened. When companies first started off-shoring their customer service departments, I was soooo tolerant - because I was naive enough to think that those people who were answering the phone were brave souls who had moved to the United States and got a job answering the phone - something that must be extremely difficult for them given the language barrier. I was patient and tolerant because I felt like they were doing so much better with English than I would be doing with their native language if the circumstances were reversed.

But then I discovered that those people were not brave. They were not even in the United States. Some clown in a suit had decided to take jobs away from Americans and send them off to Asia where they could get someone to do it for next to nothing. That was a game changer for me. Understand that I AM culturally sensitive. Part of my role when I worked in corporate America was to identify and modify communications that might be offensive to people in other cultures. But tolerance went out the window when I found out that some companies I do business with have traded my customer service experience for "cost savings". When I can, I eliminate them from my life.

"Hello, my name is Bob. How may I be helping you?" First of all, your name is not Bob - or Steve - or Wendy. And the verb form is not common usage. The syntax is different. In short,  you don't sound like you're from around here. You really know they're "not from around here" when it's your health insurance provider trying to help you find a facility near where you live. Geography can be a challenge. If you're in Houston and you're trying to help me find a place where I can get an MRI, you might not know that Celina and DeSoto are on opposite ends of the Dallas area. If you're in New York you might not know that Dallas and San Antonio are over four hours apart. But if you're in the Philippines, you might not understand that Texas is a state and those other places are cities. So when you say "I am trying to find you a place near to Texas" - it prompts me to ask you where you're located - because you have just told me that you have no clue about United States geography. No wonder I'd been on the phone with her for 10 minutes and she hadn't been able to find anything. She didn't have a clue where to look. (By the way, she refused to tell me where she was, she just kept saying that she was doing her job - something which could have been debated, but was not disputed.) By the way, that was United Healthcare. I managed to find out about their customer service before open enrollment was over and I cancelled it and went with a different provider.

I know that babies understand you when you talk, even though they can't talk back to you. I'm not sure that's the case with foreign call center employees. There have been far too many times that I hung up with the feeling that they had no idea what my problem was, much less how to solve it. Of course, when you've truly had enough and you want to close your account, they zap you over to the customer retention department and all of those people are native English speakers. My new ploy may just be to call up and say I want to close my account because while the people in Sales are always native English speakers, they are sales and can't help you with any problems.

But then there are the incoming calls. I usually don't answer those calls, but the upstairs phone doesn't have caller ID. (It's functional but is meant to be a bit more decorative.) So I often pick up the phone if I'm upstairs. My end of the conversation often sounds something like this:

"You're who? From where?"
"Can you repeat that?"
"I'm sorry, I can't understand you."
"What are you calling me about?"

There have been a few times when I suggested that they call me back after they've learned to speak English more clearly. If you are going to solve the problem I'm having with something I paid good money for, you need to speak reasonably good English. If you want me to buy your product, I need to understand what that product is and what company you represent. It's just part of my new zero tolerance policy.