{"id":2768,"date":"2012-06-28T16:33:34","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T23:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolkarma.com\/dharma\/?p=2768"},"modified":"2012-06-28T16:44:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-28T23:44:30","slug":"southern-comfort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=2768","title":{"rendered":"Southern Comfort"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Someone mentioned to me recently on the phone that I may have picked up a bit of a southern twang.\u00a0 Well, anyone talking to me in recent months has noticed that I sound more and more like my redneck kentucky transplant each day.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure its in the DNA.\u00a0 My Mom sounded like all of her boyfriends when she was with them.\u00a0 Real fun when she was married to a Rastafarian.\u00a0 “Hey Mon, Cool Runnings.”\u00a0 Mom was always an auditory chameleon, and my cochlear connections seem to have the same data encoding.<\/p>\n

Translated simply:\u00a0 I have picked up a bit of a southern twang.\u00a0 That is for anyone who has never set foot in the south (because my redneck boyfriend denies my claim that SOUTHERN California counts.)\u00a0 Its not something I do intentionally.\u00a0 It like a mocking bird that picks up the sound of your car door lock beep.\u00a0 Its just something it hears over and over and now that song is stuck in its bird brain.<\/p>\n

I have noticed however that there are certain advantages and disadvantages of sounding like a southern lady.\u00a0 On most occasions folks are down right pleasant.\u00a0 When I talk with customer service, and ask politely, “Now how can ya’ll help me out with this?”\u00a0 I find that people become genuinely helpful.\u00a0 However, there seems to be an unspoken assumption that a slight southern drawl\u00a0<\/a> may also imply that you ain’t the sharpest crayon in the kitchen.\u00a0 I came up against a young tech support geek-wanna-be this afternoon from a bank that shall remain nameless (as they have for all the other blogs when I’ve written about Chase.)\u00a0 It was a simple question.\u00a0 I press this little blue button on the screen and I get an unexplainable error message.<\/p>\n

I was polite enough to humor the customer service tech and I walked all through the steps he told me.\u00a0 Log off and log back on to your account.\u00a0 (When I worked in IT we always had the user turn OFF and turn back ON the computer, because let’s face it THAT in itself solves 90% of the issues.)\u00a0 I clicked this button, changed that setting, tweaked and verified every woo-hoo he asked me to.\u00a0 But instead of coming to the conclusion that the “bug” was on THEIR END … he began to speak more slowly and ask me if I was REALLY PRESSING the little blue button that said SUBMIT.\u00a0 Because of course he (in all his two months experience) couldn’t phathom the system was misbehaving.<\/p>\n

Putting on my HEAVY TWANG (which I reserve for door to door evangelists and unsolicited dinner time telemarketers) I said to the young ward … “Let me ease your mind, I worked 23 years as Director of Information Technology at one of the leading colleges in the country.\u00a0 I can assure you young man you are speaking with a technically savvy woman.”<\/p>\n

At which point, he put me on hold … I rocked out to some slow classic tunes … and when he came back (after consulting with a technician who had a bit of gray hair no doubt) he was able to explain why the error was occurring.\u00a0 Bravo!\u00a0 If not problem solved, it was at least now fully vetted.\u00a0 Cool Runnings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone mentioned to me recently on the phone that I may have picked up a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[58,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-service","category-humor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2768"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2774,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768\/revisions\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}