What irritates me is trying to understand the young lady telephone answerers and receptionists, employed by the local medical monopolistic conglomerate and other businesses, who speak with Mexican accented English. Granted, part of the difficulty is due to my hearing, but I also took four years of high school Spanish and even remembered enough of it to help me earn a living, however would an answerer who speaks American accented English be too much to expect?
OK, NOW you've pushed a BUTTON!
ASIDE from the fact that hardly anyone in this country answers their own phone any more, and you cannot understand what those who answer for them are saying, especially when you're old and half deaf...
For several years now (I will omit the political connotation by not giving a date/era), there has been an actual two-year degree in learning how to do the mundane chores in a medical-provider environment - a medical office-worker, so to speak. They spend TWO YEARS learning the jargon, terms, catch-phrases, buzz-words, acronyms and "CODING," and then rattle them off like YOU should know what all of it means. If you ask for clarification or explanation, you get the deep, dumb stare of exasperated impatience, meaning to me that THEY don't know what any of it means either. Every time you go to the "doctor's" office (I have a nurse practitioner, a LCNP,... LMNO,... whatever it is) all the office workers are NEW and you have to teach them all over again.
Them: (cowering) "
why are you yelling at me, sir?"
Me: (smiling)
"BECAUSE I'M HARD OF HEARING!"
HOW do people not get that?
OK. NOW, I'll go cast some bullets.
And I don't "yell" that much, really.
