There's a Southern accent where I come from...

I finally started getting my prescriptions through the Walgreens Mail Service thingee, where you get a three months supply but only pay for two months and they come through the mail. Well, when they arrived everything was there...except that they had misspelled my last name on the bottles, replacing a "C" and "K" with a "D" and "L".

So today, I called the number on the bottle and had to through not one phone menu, not two, not three, but four different menus. And after a bit of this I thought, I'm gonna get some guy named Apu, with an Indian accent so thick you coudl drown in it. Happened before when i called for tech support and when i called my credit card company. Not that I have any problems with a guy named Apu with a thick Indian accent, because I don't. If I were in India. but man, seriously, when i call about a problem I'm having with a service, I really don't want to have to try to translate what the other person is telling me.

At any rate, when someone picked up the line, it was guy named John, who had a Southern accent. He talked slowly but I had no problem understanding him. I have a friend in South Carolina, Donna, and he sounded a lot like her, and I just LOVE Donna's accent. I think it's so... homey? Comforting? Relaxed? Down home? At any rate, I like it.

While we were straightening the whole name thing out, I commented on the fact I liked hearing an accent I could understand and not some foreign accent. he said he gets that a lot. He asked for my address and phone number for confirmation purposes and after I gave it to him, he asked how far I was from Pittsburgh, because his father was from there, and his mother was from Erie and after they married, they moved to Florida, where he was born and raised. "Hence, the accent." I added, and we laughed.

Not only was it nice to understand him, but he was a helluva nice guy, and actually fun to talk to. Quite a switch from what I was used to. And I told him so. And I wish more companies woudl follow Walgreens example. But hey, big business isn't about customer service or satisfaction, it's about bigger profits and huge corporate money grubbing to the exclusion of all else.

Still, it was refreshing to talk to John.

POLT = listening to "New Star" by Tears For Fears

Why does everything you wear look like it has a grudge against you? - Edwina, Absolutely Fabulous