Out of Bounds

Out Of Bounds

By MELISSA BURNSED

My Grandmother used to say, if it doesn’t cost you money or cause harm to your family it just isn’t worth fretting about. Since I have comfortably settled into middle age, there are few things that get me riled up anymore, But sometimes circumstances come together to make me pop my cork.

One of those irksome little circumstances is when I have to call for services or information. After wasting what seems like hours of time fighting my way through layers of computer red tape, I finally get through to a real live person in some foreign call center.

I immediately become aware that trying to discuss my problem with "Bob", will be next to impossible. Bob is obviously a name he has adopted, because his heavily accented English makes it clear that he is probably Ah-Poo from Bangladesh or some other country where they pay people like a dollar a day to answer customers calls.

Invariably the conversation starts out with "Can I have your name please?" Well, no you can’t have my name, because one it’s mine and I am not giving it away. Two, proper grammatical use is something we do teach our children here in the South, even if we do forget and occasionally leave out whole syllables.

Once we get past the opening salvo in what I fondly call this WAR OF WORDS, we then proceed to the main event. This is were I usually have a meltdown, nervous breakdown or psychotic fit depending, of course, on how well we are communicating.

I can vividly recall rather animated attempts at conversation with several "bee-si-ness" representatives from my satellite, credit card and cell phone companies.

Those reps didn’t take it very well when I had to make them repeat what they were saying slowly, so I could try and decipher their broken English. And they get down right hostile if you should ask for a supervisor or someone that speaks more clearly. I can just imagine what Ah-Poo and his cohorts say about me, the ugly American, in their native tongue.

The encounters usually end with me being placed on hold and no one ever picking back up. Or I get so frustrated that I hang up and either go read the owners manual or try to find the answers on-line. But those are stories for another time.

Melissa Burnsed is a noted sports and news reporter who has branched out into, as she likes to say, "her rants."  She lives with her husband just over the state line in the Georgia Bend. Hence the name of her column, Out of Bounds.