I just got off the phone canceling an appointment with Charter to fix a problem that seems to have fixed itself.

I am just so sick of speaking to customer service people with THICK, incomprehensible accents!

Let me make a few things clear. This is not a rant about hiring people in the US from other countries, far from it. This is partly a rant about big companies outsourcing offshore. Obviously the problems with that are too numerous and go well beyond the person at the other end of the phone who you cannot understand and who is on the other side of the world. But there are also *native born* Americans who are incomprehensible as well. They come from all parts of the country (except maybe the Pacific Northwest...I've not been able to detect much accent there) and have all kinds of accents that are oft times undecipherable by people not familiar with those regions. But there is one accent that is less regional and more generational--I call it the Helium accent.

Although my problem with Charter today and yesterday involved talking to people who were probably in Albania or someplace, I also have numerous problems with the young people speaking Helium. Helium, I believe, originally started out as the Valley Girl accent, originating in the 70s and 80s in California. It immediately spread across the country, and became the accent for the under 20 crowd, then even the under 30 crowd, and is slowly creeping up to the under 40 crowd, and eventually, horrors, I fear even my generation and older will succumb. I hope not, I hope it stays a young person thing. In fact, I hope no one who is of job age will use it in the future.

Even though it is hard to do an accent in a print-only medium, maybe I can explain a few things about Helium. As with the Valley Girl accent, it too has the frequent interjections of "like," "omygod" "like," and, did I mention "like"? Spoken very quickly and in a high register, it sounds as if (notice I avoided saying "like") the speaker just huffed a snootfull of helium, hence the name. Think Munchkin land, only faster and more slurred.

"We represent the Helium kids, ohmygod, like the Helium kids, the, Helium like kids.
"We like represent the Helium kids, and ohmygod we like welcome you to Helium land!
"Like, oh...my...God!!!"

Look, if someone is washing dishes or cooking or working in a labratory or carpentry or performing a job service that does not rely on their voice being the main medium dealing with the public, then I have no problem with wherever the worker comes from. But when essentially the only thing they do is speak to the public such as a customer service rep over the phone (especially a phone-only job where there is no visual cues such as lip-reading), I want to deal with someone who I can understand clearly, who I don't have to continually ask to repeat what they just said. And it doesn't matter whether that accent is Indian, Albanian, Mexican...or Helium.

Labels: Politically Incorrect