From: "Steve Ewing" 

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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