Beside the fact that daylight savings time is a stupid idea, it's amazing how many "dumb" clocks we have around the house, e.g. clocks that don't automatically adjust to the start and stop of DST.
Car, stove, microwave for me... but on the plus side, the house alarms are back to the correct times as I don't bother setting those back for the 4 months. ETA: even worse for my bar staffs, as 2am jumps to 3am and you're not done cleaning until 5am. Opposite in November, though, and in RI last call is not extended back from 2am to 1am.
No DST here. Sunrise in June is at 0443 and sunset is around 19:15. Hope you didn't want to see your family in daylight.
So I need the assistance of a government office. Their website says they do offer English consultation services but that an appointment is necessary. Fair enough. I call the number, the staff member answers in Japanese, and I ask (in Japanese) if there is someone I can speak English to. She goes on a rapid-fire extended paragraph about... something. But in the middle of it I catch the words for "midday break," and it's 12:45 so I figure the person is on lunch. No problem. I ask (in Japanese) about when they'll be back so I can call again. Now, this is not great Japanese I'm speaking. It's broken but she seems to understand it well enough to give me another three or four machine-gun paragraphs. I respond with... uhhh, whut? (In Japanese). Somewhere in the ensuing torrent I hear the word "tomorrow" and confirm that she did indeed use that word. Guess I'll try again tomorrow. Spoiler My late mother worked for a time at a fabric store. She was, unfortunately, one of those Americans who thought that furriners were primarily hard of hearing, but at least when she was shouting at some poor Pakistani shopper she was using simple English, speaking slowly, and enunciating. She actually made friends with one of the Muslim customers, who taught her how to properly cover her hair prior to our vacation to Turkey. It's only required for visits to mosques, but the security guards gave her a little smile when they saw her doing a better job than the average non-Muslim woman.
My sympathies Iain; I guess the experience of trying to get through to a specific person in a government office is the same the world over
Happens to me every freaking morning in Japan. The hotel I usually stay in insists on calling at about 11am and asking me what I want done with the cleaning. Which would be fine, except a) I'm usually half-asleep (coz jet lag) and b) understanding someone who's babbling at you in ultra-formal keigo ain't that easy, especially when you're half-asleep.
I was getting my eyes checked for new glasses one time (may have told this story before) and the tech asked me a question I couldn't understand. So he talked it over with his coworker, trying to find a way to paraphrase it, then finally pointed to himself and said something along the lines of: 私は４３さいです。あなたは？ (I am 43 years old, how about you?) I responded "へーー？何才ですか。こども語でいいです。４４さい。(Huh? How old am I? It's okay to speak to me like a child. I'm 44) He literally could not think of the plain Japanese for "How old are you?" because he was in the presence of A Customer. The language he was using (as @Naomasa298 already mentioned) was "keigo," ultra-formal Japanese. So basically he was saying to me something like "What age might the honored customer have attained?" and couldn't remember how to say "How old are you?" Fucking YukiBots (my personal nickname for customer service staff who completely chuck their brains out and cannot, ever, go off script. Example: Some fast food restaurants have "らーじ" (sp?) size soft drinks. "Ra-ji," aka "large" with a Japanese accent. Others have "エル サイズ ("L size"). But if you order an L size in the wrong restaurant, they will have No Fucking Clue what you meant. Likewise if you order a raji size in an L size place. I dunno, maybe McDonalds staff are contractually forbidden from eating elsewhere and don't know of any other sizing system.
I like this word and will use it more often. I've come across a few of the male equivalents (SatoshiBots?).
I use it because there are Yukis and Yuukis, but to a western ear (and sometimes romanji) they're close enough to be the same.
I have an Amazon Prime order in process. It was ordered Sunday night with guaranteed delivery by 21:00 on Tuesday (today). It’s now 20:09 and when I go to the ‘track order’ page on Amazon it hasn’t even reached the ‘Out for delivery’ stage. What’s the betting if I contact their customer service to complain, they’ll ask me to wait until 21:00 as ‘It may still arrive’? Amazon don’t really do logic.
I was going to post about obnoxious social media trends, but I decided to focus on something profitable instead. I feel faintly...beatific.
If your only qualification for public office is being the widow of the guy who held the office before, I'll be voting for someone else.
People who ask meaningless questions about products on Amazon. I was looking at little bubble levels that snap into the hotshoe on a camera, and almost all of the questions were of the type, "Will this fit my Yashica Electro 35?" "Golly, that's a tough one. DOES IT HAVE A FLIPPIN' HOTSHOE?"
People who answer questions on Amazon by saying "I have no idea...." —Then WHY DID YOU ANSWER??!?!?? They must have got an email asking if they have a response, and thought they have to answer.
Or the people who post four paragraph 'reviews' of products where they only bitch about how FedEx screwed up the delivery.
The fact that my Patient Access account - where I order my repeat medical prescriptions - is harder to get into than even my online banking app. There’s an option for ‘Stay signed in’ and ‘Remember password’, neither of which work. So then I have to enter both my email and password every, single, time. After which I have to complete one of these Captcha puzzles, followed by three random letters from my memorable password, which had to be different to my normal password. All I want to do is order my meds for Pete’s sake!!
Emails (no response) Calls twice (no answer) Fills out contact form on website (no reply) Goes to their facebook page and uses personal facebook to send a facebook message (replies within 15mins)
Ah, yes, the rapidity with which some folks speak their native language. My late wife was from Chile. On one trip, I came home before she did. On the plane, I was chatting with my seat mate, who spoke fluent Spanish. Or, as he said, "I thought I did until I arrived in Chile." His view was that Chilenos are all engaged in a continual contest to see who can speak the fastest. My wife and I adopted her granddaughter, and that process itself should probably be turned into a book. At one point, I needed to talk to someone at the Chilean consulate in New York. Naturally, their phone answering message is in [Chilean] Spanish. No matter how many times I called, I could not figure out what I needed to do to speak with a live person -- even in Spanish (in which I am emphatically not fluent). So I wrote down the number and went to the local McDonald's for lunch. The shift supervisor at the time was Puerto Rican, and we had become friendly. He knew I was trying to learn to speak better Spanish and he tried to help me from time to time. So I asked for his assistance. When he took his break, he came over to my table, I told him the problem, called the consulate, and handed him the phone. After a couple of minutes, his eyes got as big as saucers. He just set the phone down and said "Wow! They do speak awfully fast, don't they?" It took us three tries before even a native speaker was able to understand what the phone message said.
My sympathy and empathy, for what they are worth. I've heard Spanish all my life; my father spoke it fluently and we lived in areas where it was a common second language. I spoke some growing up, but have only resumed study and use in the last few years. My daughter's in-laws speak Spanish only, and while visiting them, I realized that I speak and write Spanish better than I understand it, largely because I simply cannot keep up with the speed of what is being said. They are patient with me, though, and appreciate that I am trying.
I had the weirdest experience last week. I was expecting a package from overseas but got a voicemail saying I needed to call customs for some reason or other. When I rang them up the guy asked me something or other and I told him sorry, but I don't speak Japanese very well (in Japanese) and he... ...switched to a simple (grammatically correct as far as I could tell) register and made a point of speaking slowly and clearly to me. That's almost never happened to me here before. When Japanese people are confronted with foreigners, they often get flustered, and when they get flustered, they get polite. Like switching from the equivalent of "How may I help you?" to "In the event Sir is in need of any assistance, it would be my pleasure to offer it" style language. It was just such a pleasure to hear sentences at the level of "Is this your address?" "When will you be home?"
On a similar note, Amazon’s Customer Service staff who are, 99.9% of the time, Indians who speak with such strong accents I can’t understand a word they’re saying. This means half the conversation is me repeating myself to get my point across, and the other half is me saying, “Sorry, can you say that again, please, I couldn’t understand a word you were saying.”
It ain't just Amazon. It was long enough ago that I don't even remember the company (might have been AT&T, in fact,) but I was connected to such a person when I needed help. The young woman claimed her name was "Sarah" (which is another annoyance of itself: why do the Indian technical people insist on using English/American names when the customer knows within 7.3 seconds that that's NOT their name), and I couldn't understand her ... at all. I finally gave up and asked to be connected to someone who speaks English. Her response? "I are talking English bery [sic] good!"
Amazon does send e-mails asking customers to respond to product questions. I get them all the time. There's an option to click on "I don't know," and I don't think that gets entered as a response on the product's page. The people who actually answer "I don't know" have to go out of their way to do that, and I can't imaging how they think that might be even marginally helpful.
