Work: Accents or, if you prefer, Acoints

Well work was a bit, loike, strange tawday. First o’ awl, my woikemate weren’t able twa make it in tawday coze she’s ill loike (so I had taw get someone else taw open t’door) and then everything went alright loike – just extremely busy coze I had taw dau taw peaples jobs tawday. Then I hoid a call for technickle support and the person thaught he recogniced me voice – he’s from Worcester and I had worked in the Bloick Countray for around taw years, but I’m soure I ain’t poicked up the accent have I?

Ok, it’s a LOT harder to type in a Black Country accent then to speak it but I’m sure I haven’t picked up the accent: although it has been a “standing joke” with my GESF that I have got a Brummie (Birmingham) accent. Birmingham is around 45 miles away and the “Black Country” (so called because of the amount of coal mining that used to take place in the area) is around 55 miles away. I did ask my new work colleague (she started on Monday) and she doesn’t think I have a Brummie accent but…*shrug* Some people do even manage to pick up on my Mum’s accent and she only lived in her birth country for around 7 years!

After I managed to clear some of my work backlog (still got at least 4 sites to search engine optimise tomorrow, a review of a major clients site and probably some account setting up to do for hosting clients: along with celebrating one of my other co-worker’s birthday) and 5 minutes after I should finish (I’m tending to do around 30 minutes unpaid overtime a day at the moment) we get a telephone call….

My co-worker answers it and figures out “that they want to complain internet” but they are calling from a mobile thats nearly out of credit, but they don’t know the number of the phone they want me to call them back on so they’ll call back. They did and my co-worker (who, co-incidentally, has the same name as my GESF) passes the details across. She mentions that the female caller is a bit difficult to under stand because of her accent and that “she wants to complain internet” – for some reason that makes me instantly think the caller is Portuguese. Why? I dunno, just a “feeling” you get after working with Portuguese people after a while you get to pick up the way they construct English sentences: hey, at one point I was the only non-Portuguese person in a group of over a dozen working together in one of my old places of work…

Any way, I call her back and she says she wants her money back! I think “f–k, I ain’t got a clue how we issue refunds as we’ve just had no need to do so since I’ve been there – what the h–ll has happened to make a customer want their money back?”. I talk to her (yep, she is Portuguese) and find out she put “£10 in machine but no want internet but need money back. Who do complain to as no good complain to machine. You should have people to deal with complains”. At this point, I’m a bit puzzled as a) we don’t have any “machines” she could put money in, but with a poor command of English I’m willing to accept that as an explanation that she brought something over the internet from us and the “machine” is a computer and b) we don’t actually have any prices as low as £10. She goes on a bit (she’s one of those people who, despite how hard you try, just won’t let you interrupt her) and I find out she’s been to the police to get our number so that she can get her money back. This confuses me a bit further – I try and convince her she’s got the wrong number (as I’ve practically sussed she’s somehow put money into a sort of ‘pay point’ street style machine) but she’s not having anything like that. I even try and ask her simple questions like “where is machine?”, “we no do internet, just web hosting” but she just keeps on repeating the same information…

Then something begins to dawn on me and my boss mentions “cafe”. It all starts to click into place. We have a company name very similar to a “well-known” company that does employ “bully boy” style tactics against any company that even uses part of their name (although our company has been running long and registered on the internet and at companies house longer) and it seems the nice police officer just searched on the internet for the “common” part of the company name. However, since we are primarily a search engine optimisation company our company appears high in the SE rankings – hence the first site he/she came across was probably ours and hence gave the woman our number instead of the one of the company she needed!

I eventually (5minutes on the phone so far) manage to interrupt her and convince her that she HAS got the wrong company, that we have nothing to do with the machine that she put her £10 – and it’s amazing how apologetic she turns and how her command of English improves.

Now, I’m not going to say that this is “typically Portuguese” (as a member of my family would probably get lynched by a dozen of my ex-co-workers if I did) but has anyone else noticed that when people are complaining, their command of non-native languages slips? Is it just “stress” related or is it an unconscious method to try and “gain sympathy”? I know some of the Portuguese I used to work with could speak excellent English – but only if they wanted to, if they wanted help from you they’d ask in perfect English, but if they complained – well, sometimes they needed a friend to translate…

Saying all that, I perhaps shouldn’t even be contemplating the psychosomatics of emotive language interchange (long words there!) as I know English (and, if you catch me before I’ve had some caffeine, I have difficulty speaking that!) and “geek”. No, not “Greek” (although I know around 4 words) but Geek as in “computer speak”: I can hold my own in conversations about most things techy and mobile phone related, but I wouldn’t quite class it as a “separate language”.

So the number of “foreign” languages I know = 0. I have tried, on various occasions, to learn French, Latin and Gujarati but all without success. My GESF, on the other hand, knows Italian, a bit of Russian, quite a bit of French, some German and a few others I’ve forgotten – and one of my co-workers is a native Gujarati speaker but I could have sworn her mother tongue was English as she speaks it so well (she’s actually worried about how good her English is yet some of the time it’s a lot better than mine!).

Ok – now as I’m sure I’ve offended practically every language, I’ll sign off 🙂 . Geia sou.