Monday, November 05, 2007

Making myself understood

I don't want to come off as one of those English-only purists. I'm a live and let live kinda girl. Watching my daughter's bilingual friend with his monolingual mom leads me to believe that parenting a teenager who can speak a language you don't is fraught with peril, but best of luck for trying.

You'd think, though, that there would be certain jobs for which a clear command of English is a legitimate requirement. One of those would be speech therapist for English-speaking kids, but last year, when my son had a therapist neither the kids nor the parents could understand, I found out that's not the case.

Another would be telemarketers. I don't know if there's some sort of anti-discrimination law that forbids companies from declining to employ unclear English speakers, but speaking as a customer, let me just make this clear to anyone who wants to sell me something: If I cannot understand the description of what you want me to buy, I am not going to buy it. I am going to hang up the phone.

Understand? Sheesh.

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