Language Barriers...tell your stories

[Digitalpotato]

A couple women EWs are angry that we don't know Chinese and they demand for us to speak Chinese because they hate English (or "Eng-Lishe" as one said it). They've even written in complaints IN CHINESE thinking we'd get it.

Mind you this isn't Beijing...this is Colorado...


One of my mom's customers is also French Canadian and only really speaks French and Franglais - so he once tried to arrange a meeting in a different "Timeslut".

[Midorikawa]

I have a few from my customer archive. Most of what I had as a chat tech were babelfish obfuscations common to various languages...seemingly making things nigh on impossible to work with:

Customer [1:43:14 AM]: hi,dear sir,my site have been got the trouble of cockhorse,please help me to solve it online,thanks

(After 15 minutes of trying to figure out what in the world babelfish had done to this poor guy's text, it dawned on me that Cockhorse == Trojan Virus...) O_O

Example number 2:

*insert long discussion about really basic issue*
Customer [5:11:33 AM]: the highest speed here is only 10 mb
Customer [5:11:45 AM]: we r in the hell
Customer [5:11:50 AM]: u r in the moon
Customer [5:12:01 AM]: on the moon

Then there's those who (most definitely incorrectly) assume that because I (was) tier 1 support I'm Indian:

Customer [4:48:33 AM]: btao na yaar
Customer [4:48:49 AM]: i m Indian
Customer [4:48:55 AM]: u r also an Indian
Me [4:49:43 AM]: No. I’m an American.
Customer [4:49:53 AM]: Really?
Me [4:50:02 AM]: Really really.

[StarsAreFixed]

I get the most ridiculous mimes of people trying to get me to tell them where the gitting rooms are. What's incredibly annoying is when they come up and speak a foreign language to you. AGHHH!! It's so rude to assume you're going to get an answer. Or when you can't understand the possible meaning of two irrelevant english words which do not a sentence make, and they sigh and roll their eyes and launch into a foreign language. Or better yet, 'Do you speak German/Spanish/Italian/Polish/Russian?' Err..no! You should just assume no-one will. They're all extremely rude and let-down. Don't expect Irish people who ehh look Irish to be able to speak your language. It's incredibly awkward.

[AccountingDrone]

Not applying to my job, but in Paris in the 70s my mum and I were doing the tourist thing. I speak english and french, my mum english and german. We had a police officer trying to interface with a pair of german tourists ....

they would talk to my mom, she would talk to me and I would talk to the cop .... Very fun and everybody had a good time once we hammered out the language issues. They got to their hotels and we were amused at the game of 'telephone' that ensued.

I have always loved traveling and meeting people, and have never had problems with communicating. I am perfectly willing to try and learn a few words and sound silly ...

[Chris K.]

I had a Spanish person the other day come to my register, and we were running a Buy 3, Get 1 Free sale on all of our used product. He came to me with three used items, and I tried to tell him he could get something else for free, but all he kept saying was "I want this," so I gave up. Very frustrating.