LANGUAGES: Retail and Service Workers who Don't Understand English are Worse than Puberty

Remember your introductory Spanish class, perfectly timed to coincide with that year or two when your voice was cracking and your forays into makeup mostly wound up in neon swatches across your front teeth or crumbling off your mountain range of zits like so much 'medium-flesh-tone' plaster dust, and how, cruelly enough, it was mostly conducted via oral examination? Remember how your teacher would prompt you for that week's vocab quiz with something like "Where did Leah find her books about penguin mating?" and you would respond "Leah want go place next store an books, where books of free," because you're supposed to work around the words you don't know? And how this was almost guaranteed to get you a solid B+, and three to five premature stomach ulcers?

That was the easy version. In life there are no B+s for crap work, there's only complete and utter foolishness coupled with a total lack of effective communication.

Let's say, just for argument's sake, that you want to stop into your local CVS to pick up some shoe polish, tampons, and a bag of circus peanuts. Normal, everyday stuff, right? But maybe it's not your regular CVS, or maybe, the product of continued urban sprawl, it's approximately 10,000 square feet of poorly-marked, unflatteringly lit ranchland for the perpetually overweight and underdressed.

Logically enough, you seek out the nearest polyester vest, apologize to that woman for thinking her fashion choices indicated that she was an employee, and then, finding one holding a price gun somewhere in the hair nets aisle, you pose your question.

"Excuse me, where do you have shoe polish?"

The blank stare that greets you is worse than the time your braces got stuck together with Jimmy Tickle's while your period totally bled through the back of your new white pants and you burped right into his mouth. Because you operate under the false impression that you can overcome the blank stare.

First you just slow those words on down and cut out all unnecessary articles, because we all know that nouns in a foreign language are easier to understand in retarded Pidgin, delivered with a pointed finger.

"You…have…shoe…polish? Polish for shoes? Polish shoes?"

The eyebrows creep towards each other, squeezing out any hope of understanding.

But you do remember some of that intro Spanish, which, if you mime the act of shoe polishing while you attempt your "zapato polish? polish de zapatos?" will work out for you. This elicits more crinkling of the forehead and the eventual response of "Russian," with a thumb pointed at the wrinkled polyester armor.

Finally you go into full on charades, rubbing back and forth at your shoe with your fictional cloth, worrying slightly that this might somehow be minstrelsy, until the clouds part, and you finally get that coveted

"Aisle Tree."

Oh thank god. Now try that again for tampons. You stick them up in? Inside? A interior?

Now Karla and myself are all for giving the less fortunate jobs that we don't want. And of course this lack of communication isn't a problem when you are conversational in 23½ languages, including Basque. But really, the person behind the counter, or taking my pizza order over the phone, or making my McFlurrie, extra Butterfingers, with half-caramel and half-chocolate swirls throughout the bottom 1/3 of the cup, is the front line of customer relations for your company. Wouldn't a working knowledge of the English language, or at least of the nouns therein that your store stocks, your restaurant serves, or your massage parlor will euphemistically provide for an extra $20 cash, be beneficial to you? It would certainly help me out.

Which is why you get an F- on the pop quiz, for making basic tasks, like conspicuous consumption, much, much more painful than puberty.

Posted by Jilly