Speak a ommon spelling error list (hints on demand)

On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:50:42 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 08/30/2017 08:48 PM, Mack A. Damia wrote:

[snip]

A "moment" has lasted as long as forty-five minutes for me when
calling the VA, and a recorded message comes on every minute to remind
you that "an operator will be with you in just a moment".

Sometimes there'll be music playing (often bad music with low audio
quality). The purpose of this seems to be to prevent you from listening
to the music you want to listen to. Then the music stops at an abnormal
place in the song (as if someone is coming on the line) followed by a
few seconds or silence followed by a fake-personal message like "YOUR
call is important to us. Please hold and one of our representatives will
be with you SHORTLY.". Them more music...


Not to mention "Your call will be answered in the order it was
received," a sentence which makes no sense.

On 01/09/17 08:00, Ken Blake wrote:
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:50:42 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 08/30/2017 08:48 PM, Mack A. Damia wrote:

[snip]

A "moment" has lasted as long as forty-five minutes for me when
calling the VA, and a recorded message comes on every minute to remind
you that "an operator will be with you in just a moment".

Sometimes there'll be music playing (often bad music with low audio
quality). The purpose of this seems to be to prevent you from listening
to the music you want to listen to. Then the music stops at an abnormal
place in the song (as if someone is coming on the line) followed by a
few seconds or silence followed by a fake-personal message like "YOUR
call is important to us. Please hold and one of our representatives will
be with you SHORTLY.". Them more music...

Not to mention "Your call will be answered in the order it was
received," a sentence which makes no sense.

Some companies are more considerate, and say things like "You are now
number five in the queue".

What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

On Fri, 1 Sep 2017 12:27:38 +1000, Peter Moylan
wrote:

On 01/09/17 08:00, Ken Blake wrote:
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:50:42 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 08/30/2017 08:48 PM, Mack A. Damia wrote:

[snip]

A "moment" has lasted as long as forty-five minutes for me when
calling the VA, and a recorded message comes on every minute to remind
you that "an operator will be with you in just a moment".

Sometimes there'll be music playing (often bad music with low audio
quality). The purpose of this seems to be to prevent you from listening
to the music you want to listen to. Then the music stops at an abnormal
place in the song (as if someone is coming on the line) followed by a
few seconds or silence followed by a fake-personal message like "YOUR
call is important to us. Please hold and one of our representatives will
be with you SHORTLY.". Them more music...

Not to mention "Your call will be answered in the order it was
received," a sentence which makes no sense.

Some companies are more considerate, and say things like "You are now
number five in the queue".

What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.

Some "help" lines allow you to leave your number and someone will
return the call. It's worked pretty well for me.
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida

In article ,
Peter Moylan wrote:
On 01/09/17 08:00, Ken Blake wrote:
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:50:42 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 08/30/2017 08:48 PM, Mack A. Damia wrote:

[snip]

A "moment" has lasted as long as forty-five minutes for me when
calling the VA, and a recorded message comes on every minute to remind
you that "an operator will be with you in just a moment".

Sometimes there'll be music playing (often bad music with low audio
quality). The purpose of this seems to be to prevent you from
listening to the music you want to listen to. Then the music stops at
an abnormal place in the song (as if someone is coming on the line)
followed by a few seconds or silence followed by a fake-personal
message like "YOUR call is important to us. Please hold and one of our
representatives will be with you SHORTLY.". Them more music...

Not to mention "Your call will be answered in the order it was
received," a sentence which makes no sense.

Some companies are more considerate, and say things like "You are now
number five in the queue".

with the system we had in our office, if you were taken out of the queue to
be told this, and the queue shortened, you still came back at number 5!

What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.

You get those too?

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England

On Fri, 01 Sep 2017 05:10:55 +0100, charles
wrote:

In article ,
Peter Moylan wrote:
On 01/09/17 08:00, Ken Blake wrote:
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:50:42 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 08/30/2017 08:48 PM, Mack A. Damia wrote:

[snip]

A "moment" has lasted as long as forty-five minutes for me when
calling the VA, and a recorded message comes on every minute to remind
you that "an operator will be with you in just a moment".

Sometimes there'll be music playing (often bad music with low audio
quality). The purpose of this seems to be to prevent you from
listening to the music you want to listen to. Then the music stops at
an abnormal place in the song (as if someone is coming on the line)
followed by a few seconds or silence followed by a fake-personal
message like "YOUR call is important to us. Please hold and one of our
representatives will be with you SHORTLY.". Them more music...

Not to mention "Your call will be answered in the order it was
received," a sentence which makes no sense.

Some companies are more considerate, and say things like "You are now
number five in the queue".

with the system we had in our office, if you were taken out of the queue to
be told this, and the queue shortened, you still came back at number 5!

What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.

You get those too?

Yesterday, after lunch in a restaurant, I came out to find my car's
battery had died. I called my insurance company's road service number
to get someone out to jump the car.

The person on the phone had trouble identifying my location. The
restaurant is on a road that has a number (SR 436) but also has names.
Plural. It changes names in each suburb it goes through, and I was in
one suburb but within a mile of another suburb to the east and within
a mile of another suburb to the west.

I tried to provide landmarks, but he was unfamiliar with the area. It
turned out that he was in Minnesota, not Florida. I thought his
accent was a bit strange for a Floridian, but it did make it easier
that he was not in Manila, Singapore, or Mumbai.

Certainly easier to understand than the people who call once a week
telling me that they have discovered there's a problem with my
computer and want to let them log on and correct the problem.





--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida

"Tony Cooper" wrote

| Some "help" lines allow you to leave your number and someone will
| return the call. It's worked pretty well for me.

Fine if you can be available to take the call, but
what they've actually done is to replace operators
with an answering machine, allowing them to set
the schedule. They're no longer "open for business".
As someone who doesn't carry a cellphone I find that
system nearly unusable.

On 08/31/2017 11:05 PM, Tony Cooper wrote:

[sni[]

Some "help" lines allow you to leave your number and someone will
return the call. It's worked pretty well for me.

Wait 8 hours effectively in jail since you have to be home to hear the
phone, then make a mistake and step outside for 30 seconds. THAT'S when
they call. Then start the whole process again...

BTW, Of course this is less true now when you have cordless and cell
phones. That doesn't mean I don't remember it.

On 08/31/2017 11:10 PM, charles wrote:

[snip]

What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.

You get those too?


I had a lot of that when I had a WiFi hotspot from a V company (no, not
Verizon).

BTW, When I bought a prepaid card, the receipt was printed "Virgin $30".

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"What the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore." Bishop
John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, (San
Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 24.

On Fri, 1 Sep 2017 12:27:38 +1000, Peter Moylan
wrote:

On 01/09/17 08:00, Ken Blake wrote:
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:50:42 -0500

Sometimes there'll be music playing (often bad music with low audio
quality). The purpose of this seems to be to prevent you from listening
to the music you want to listen to. Then the music stops at an abnormal
place in the song (as if someone is coming on the line) followed by a
few seconds or silence followed by a fake-personal message like "YOUR
call is important to us. Please hold and one of our representatives will
be with you SHORTLY.". Them more music...

Not to mention "Your call will be answered in the order it was
received," a sentence which makes no sense.

Some companies are more considerate, and say things like "You are now
number five in the queue".


I don't recall ever hearing that, but yes, it would be much better.



What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.


Same here, but it isn't always an Indian accent. Any heavy accent is a
problem-even if it's an American accent from some parts of the USA.
I'm all in favor of giving jobs to people all over the world,
regardless of what languages they speak or what accents they have. But
I'm against giving jobs that require speaking on the phone or in
public to someone with a heavy accent.

I've been in airports in some parts of the USA where announcements
were made by someone with a Spanish accent so heavy that I couldn't
understand him. And the speaker might well have been a US citizen.
Sure, give someone like that a job in the airport; just don't give him
*that* job.

On Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:59:11 -0400, Tony Cooper
wrote:

Yesterday, after lunch in a restaurant, I came out to find my car's
battery had died. I called my insurance company's road service number
to get someone out to jump the car.

The person on the phone had trouble identifying my location. The
restaurant is on a road that has a number (SR 436) but also has names.
Plural. It changes names in each suburb it goes through, and I was in
one suburb but within a mile of another suburb to the east and within
a mile of another suburb to the west.

I tried to provide landmarks, but he was unfamiliar with the area. It
turned out that he was in Minnesota, not Florida. I thought his
accent was a bit strange for a Floridian, but it did make it easier
that he was not in Manila, Singapore, or Mumbai.


I've gotten help desks with people in Manila, Singapore, and Mumbai.
Some of them spoke English with an accent so heavy that I couldn't
understand them; others spoke with an accent so slight that it was no
problem at all. As I said in another message moments ago, I don't care
where he's from; I care how well he speaks English.

By the way, I study classical guitar, and my teacher is from Manila.
He speaks English with no accent at all. If you would listen to him,
you would probably think he was from the USA.



Certainly easier to understand than the people who call once a week
telling me that they have discovered there's a problem with my
computer and want to let them log on and correct the problem.



Those are the people you don't want to understand. vbg

On Fri, 1 Sep 2017 13:52:32 -0500, Sam E
wrote:

On 08/31/2017 11:05 PM, Tony Cooper wrote:

[sni[]

Some "help" lines allow you to leave your number and someone will
return the call. It's worked pretty well for me.

Wait 8 hours effectively in jail since you have to be home to hear the
phone, then make a mistake and step outside for 30 seconds. THAT'S when
they call. Then start the whole process again...


In my experience, whenever I've been given that option, I have also
been told the maximum time I will have to wait for the callback. It
usually isn't very long and I choose the option only if I know I'll be
home for that period.

"Ken Blake" wrote in message
...
Some companies are more considerate, and say things like "You are now
number five in the queue".


I don't recall ever hearing that, but yes, it would be much better.



What really annoys me is being on hold for an hour, and then being
answered by someone whose Indian accent is so strong that I can hardly
understand a word.


Same here, but it isn't always an Indian accent. Any heavy accent is a
problem-even if it's an American accent from some parts of the USA.
I'm all in favor of giving jobs to people all over the world,
regardless of what languages they speak or what accents they have. But
I'm against giving jobs that require speaking on the phone or in
public to someone with a heavy accent.

I'm OK with most British accents, even fair strong ones, though Glasgow and
Ayrshire (south west Scotland) accents can be a bit of a problem.

But an Indian accent is an order of magnitude worse. However a lot of the
problem is not just the accent but the fact that they work from scripts and
cannot think on their feet and modify what they are saying depending on the
technical knowledge of the person who is making the enquiry. I'm thinking
particularly of the various ISPs (especially BT and Talktalk) that I have to
phone on a customer's behalf when I'm trying to sort out their computer
problems. They seem to have cultivated a very special style of being
clueless and yet inflexibly patronising. It is a breath of fresh air to find
I'm talking to an Indian who may have a fairly strong accent but who treats
me as an equal and who will listen as I brief them on what does as well as
what doesn't work, and what I've already tried unsuccessfully, and who will
then make sensible suggestions based on that, rather than telling me to try
things that I've already told them I've tried.

My wife has worked quite a bit with Indians, who are either working here in
the UK or who are in India, working for an outsourced company, and she said
that one of the things you need to make allowances for is cultural: Indians
find it very hard to say no or to contradict you, so you ask a question "So
can I leave you to do that task" and they will assure you "Oh, yes, most
definitely" when they aren't going to do it but don't want to admit that. I
much prefer a more honest, "what they tell you is what will happen"
attitude. The rather servile way that they use your name or else "Sir" at
the end of every sentence soon grates, as well!

So sometimes attitude is even more important than accent.



While we're thinking of cultural differences, one of the most disconcerting
experiences I've had is video-conferences with Finnish colleagues. You
realise that you have to make allowances for the technical coding/decoding
delays of a typical video-conferencing system. You realise that it takes
longer to attune your ear to English spoken with a guttural Finnish accent
(*) than to a French or German speaker of English. But nothing prepares you
for The Delay. If I was to ask you a question that you could not answer
immediately, you'd probably say "Um. Let me think about that." pretty
quickly. Then you'd come back a few seconds later (or longer) with your
considered answer. Finns aren't like that - or at least not the ones I've
dealt with. You ask a question and you get absolutely no facial or verbal
response whatsoever. The immediate instinct when this happens is to think
that they haven't heard you or understood you, so you restate the question
in simpler English - and get a frustrated, annoyed look. Apparently Finns
only give you one response - the eventual final answer - and not
additionally the "I've heard and understood you, but I need to think for a
moment" response.


(*) Of all the foreign speakers of English that I've heard, Finnish is
hardest to adjust to because they don't consistently pronounce a given vowel
or consonant in the same non-UK way: they may pronounce the same sound or
even the same word in several very different ways in the same sentence.

I once witnessed the most excruciating, painful, toe-curlingly embarrassing
meeting when the Finnish managers came over to give us all a motivational
briefing - in the local ice-rink of all places, being a stadium with enough
seats to house people from the whole office building. This very staid
Finnish guy who looked like a funeral director tried to be all upbeat and
motivational, and at one point he said "Repeat after me" and then he uttered
some strange guttural noises. After we'd all exchanged initial "*What* did
he say?" whispers, the whole stadium faithfully repeated these sounds -
without having the faintest idea what we were supposed to be saying. This
happened several times - the same guttural sounds from the manager, repeated
faithfully from us without a shred of comprehension. It was only much later
that we were told that he was saying "Go do! Go do!" - in other words, "get
busy doing things - win more business" etc. An utterly hilarious and absurd
experience.

On 01/09/2017 20:16, Ken Blake wrote:
By the way, I study classical guitar, and my teacher is from Manila.
He speaks English with no accent at all. If you would listen to him,
you would probably think he was from the USA.

So he does have an accent.


--
Ray
UK

On 09/01/2017 02:40 PM, Ken Blake wrote:

[snip]

In my experience, whenever I've been given that option, I have also
been told the maximum time I will have to wait for the callback. It
usually isn't very long and I choose the option only if I know I'll be
home for that period.


It seems that for most of mine there is no time limit, or they give one
and ignore it. Some of that may be selective memory.

Another thing is when they say "within 3 days" which is a lie when they
mean BUSINESS DAYS, which make a significantly longer period than real days.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"What the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore." Bishop
John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, (San
Fransisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 24.

On Fri, 1 Sep 2017 13:52:32 -0500, Sam E
wrote:

On 08/31/2017 11:05 PM, Tony Cooper wrote:

[sni[]

Some "help" lines allow you to leave your number and someone will
return the call. It's worked pretty well for me.

Wait 8 hours effectively in jail since you have to be home to hear the
phone, then make a mistake and step outside for 30 seconds. THAT'S when
they call. Then start the whole process again...

My experience has been much more favorable than that. The call is
usually returned promptly, and I don't use that option unless I expect
to be home and available.
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida