No, it's you who has the aaaaack-sent
My job involves making a lot of phone calls. I'm not exactly enamoured with that aspect-I'd really rather use email for almost all long-distance communication, but an astonishing number of businesses never reply to emails from their customers-though I'm minding it less and less as time goes by. Having an obviously foreign accent interacts with this rather amusingly.
On the one hand, when I'm cold-calling somewhere I almost invariably have to repeat the first thing I say because people aren't expecting to actually hear the "t"s that are written (though my own pattern of dropped phonemes caused some trouble this morning when I was trying to get a wheeled chair...). On the other, when I'm calling someone for the second time they invariably remember who I am, and I seem to find myself having to waste a lot less time than I expected reminding people of what we already discussed.
The most entertaining part, though, is how many people feel a burning desire to tell me about their tenuous connection to Britain. An awful lot of people in the western United States appear to have a third cousin thrice removed in some random corner of the country or other. Though I'm no more interested than I sound in peoples' remote relatives who happen to live on the same island where I grew up, it is quite handy having this built-in icebreaker with about half the people I ever phone.
On the one hand, when I'm cold-calling somewhere I almost invariably have to repeat the first thing I say because people aren't expecting to actually hear the "t"s that are written (though my own pattern of dropped phonemes caused some trouble this morning when I was trying to get a wheeled chair...). On the other, when I'm calling someone for the second time they invariably remember who I am, and I seem to find myself having to waste a lot less time than I expected reminding people of what we already discussed.
The most entertaining part, though, is how many people feel a burning desire to tell me about their tenuous connection to Britain. An awful lot of people in the western United States appear to have a third cousin thrice removed in some random corner of the country or other. Though I'm no more interested than I sound in peoples' remote relatives who happen to live on the same island where I grew up, it is quite handy having this built-in icebreaker with about half the people I ever phone.