From: "Gary Britt" 

You are right about accents affecting communication, especially as one gets
older.  Also, I can related to your hi Dave.  I tell people my name is Gary
on the phone and 1/2 the time they reply "ok hi Jerry".  Now a J
and a G don't sound anything alike to me, but I must be saying in a manner
that I don't hear myself.

Gary

"Steve Ewing"  wrote in message
news:op.s0q08be1sagvys{at}news.barkto.com...
> On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 19:22:14 -0500, Bruce Biermann  wrote:
>
> > By the time I have to call a call center, I'm going to be pretty
> > frustrated.
> > And if the person answering the phone can't speak English, German,
> > French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian, I am even going to be more
> > frustrated.
>
> My problem is with accents-- I have a hard time hearing/understanding
> people on the phone, and a thick Indian/Hispanic/British/black/Southern
> etc., etc. accent just compounds the problem.
>
> And it works both ways-- I mumble so badly that I have taken to calling
> myself "Steven" on the phone: I say, "Hi, this is
Steve," and they say,
> "Hi, Dave!".  It happens several times a day.
>
> When I was front-line tech support, we had a girl working with us who took
> all kinds of abuse; first, just for being a girl, the assumption being she
> couldn't know about computers; and second, because she just had this *tone
> of voice*-- it came across as really snotty when she was trying to be
> nice.  When I was doing the hiring, phone/conversation was a big part of
> it; I can always train the technical stuff.
>
> --
> Steve 
> http://www.qmss.com/~sewing

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