Southern Comfort
Someone mentioned to me recently on the phone that I may have picked up a bit of a southern twang. Well, anyone talking to me in recent months has noticed that I sound more and more like my redneck kentucky transplant each day. I’m pretty sure its in the DNA. My Mom sounded like all of her boyfriends when she was with them. Real fun when she was married to a Rastafarian. “Hey Mon, Cool Runnings.” Mom was always an auditory chameleon, and my cochlear connections seem to have the same data encoding.
Translated simply: I have picked up a bit of a southern twang. That is for anyone who has never set foot in the south (because my redneck boyfriend denies my claim that SOUTHERN California counts.) Its not something I do intentionally. It like a mocking bird that picks up the sound of your car door lock beep. Its just something it hears over and over and now that song is stuck in its bird brain.
I have noticed however that there are certain advantages and disadvantages of sounding like a southern lady. On most occasions folks are down right pleasant. When I talk with customer service, and ask politely, “Now how can ya’ll help me out with this?” I find that people become genuinely helpful. However, there seems to be an unspoken assumption that a slight southern drawl may also imply that you ain’t the sharpest crayon in the kitchen. I came up against a young tech support geek-wanna-be this afternoon from a bank that shall remain nameless (as they have for all the other blogs when I’ve written about Chase.) It was a simple question. I press this little blue button on the screen and I get an unexplainable error message.
I was polite enough to humor the customer service tech and I walked all through the steps he told me. Log off and log back on to your account. (When I worked in IT we always had the user turn OFF and turn back ON the computer, because let’s face it THAT in itself solves 90% of the issues.) I clicked this button, changed that setting, tweaked and verified every woo-hoo he asked me to. But instead of coming to the conclusion that the “bug” was on THEIR END … he began to speak more slowly and ask me if I was REALLY PRESSING the little blue button that said SUBMIT. Because of course he (in all his two months experience) couldn’t phathom the system was misbehaving.
Putting on my HEAVY TWANG (which I reserve for door to door evangelists and unsolicited dinner time telemarketers) I said to the young ward … “Let me ease your mind, I worked 23 years as Director of Information Technology at one of the leading colleges in the country. I can assure you young man you are speaking with a technically savvy woman.”
At which point, he put me on hold … I rocked out to some slow classic tunes … and when he came back (after consulting with a technician who had a bit of gray hair no doubt) he was able to explain why the error was occurring. Bravo! If not problem solved, it was at least now fully vetted. Cool Runnings.
