zesticle.com

Speak. Clearly. On. The. Phone.

Seriously.

I get several phone calls every day at work from people who sound like they might be retarded somehow because I can’t understand a word they say due to how poorly they enunciate when they’re speaking. I think the majority of you are already familiar with my disdain for talking on the phone in general, but when I have to try to decipher what you’re saying, it makes it much, much worse. Like justifiable-stabbing worse.

Actually, it’s not just on the phone. I don’t have to deal with it anymore, but there were several times during one of my stints as an employee in the retail industry in which I would have some slack-jawed asshat ask me or tell me something and I would have no idea what they just said. It’s ridiculous. One guy in particular stands out in my mind; I was working at Circuit City in Bloomington and he asked me a question about a computer. I had to ask him three times to repeat himself on the first question and had to make the same request multiple other times throughout the conversation. It was one of those times where I would have gladly foregone any possible commission just to avoid dealing with someone.

So stop being lazy speakers. Corky and I thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Jon sent me a link a couple days ago to this article, which examines the phenomenon of people overestimating their abilities, and the fact that the people who tend to overestimate their abilities the most are the people who are the least skilled in said ability. Basically, people who suck at certain things often think they are much better than they are, and people who are good at them are better than they give themselves credit for.

And, of course, this is something that can be thrown in the “No shit, Sherlock” file, as I think we’ve all seen this manifested before. In a group setting, when a volunteer is needed to get something done, the first person to raise their hand is often the last person you’d really want working on it (if it’s important).

I know that I probably tend to underestimate my abilities in many areas, although it’s difficult to determine whether I am truly underestimating myself or other people overestimate me. Probably a little bit of both.

But this theory lends itself to other areas as well. For instance, I have always wondered if ugly people know that they’re ugly (please spare me the “in the eye of the beholder” nonsense, as there is a difference between not finding someone attractive and someone being ugly). Do stupid people know they’re stupid? It seems that annoying people generally don’t know that they’re annoying (or one would hope that they would KNOCK IT OFF).

I don’t really have a great conclusion for this. If nothing else, it’s something to think about you’re telling someone how great or horrible you are in some capacity.

I work in an area of town that is very near some neighborhoods where it seems the majority of the people are native Spanish speakers. I was driving through there today to go pick up some lunch and was looking at the rows of small shops lining the streets, all of them with their signage solely in Spanish. One of them was a bakery, and as soon as I saw it, an image of a “Mexican wedding cake” popped into my head. This is what they look like:

Apparently these kinds of cookies are also called Russian tea cakes or Russian tea biscuits, but when I was growing up, I always heard them called Mexican wedding cakes. I started wondering if maybe they used to be called something else, and that maybe the Mexican thing got stuck on there as some sort of weird baking-related ethnic insult. I wondered if I had gone into that little bakery and asked for a Mexican wedding cake, would the proprietor have gotten angry with me for coming into his store and insulting him?

“You don’t think a Mexican can afford a real cake?”

At any rate, I find myself suddenly very uncomfortable with their nomenclature. On the plus side of things, I don’t really ever have to say it since I don’t particularly like that kind of cookie and won’t be asking for one. And I suppose if I ever needed to, I could just ask for “one of the little round cookies with powdered sugar on it.”

This little thought train reminded me that a few years ago I started seriously wondering if the term “spic & span” was born of some jab at hispanics. “Spic” is obviously a racial epithet, and “span” is half of “spanish.” Does anyone think there’s something to that, or am I just overthinking here?

By the way, today is the first day of spring. We’re supposed to get like 6″ of snow tomorrow. WTF?