There's Speaking English, and Then There's .....

Yesterday, I needed to make a reservation for a rental car. I decided to do it by phone. That wouldn't have been a bad idea, except that the customer service guy could barely speak comprehensible English, had a hard time understanding what I said, and could not answer my questions! He may have been Hispanic, or he may have been the result of out-sourcing to India. It's hard to say. One thing I can say is that it would be nice if companies would put people on their customer service jobs who can actually speak and understand the English language! This guy said that if we put the rental car on our debit card, there would be a "$300 hold." "What does that mean?" I asked. (Seemed like a logical question to me.) "It means," he bravely began, "that there will be a $300 hold." Thank you! I would have never guessed. I remember back in the mid-'90's, I called the toll-free number for buying tickets to a Colorado Rockies baseball game when Lydia and I were heading out to Denver for an EPC General Assembly. When I got home that afternoon and told Lydia that I had bought the tickets, she asked me if they were good seats. "I don't know," I told her. "I had so much trouble understanding the lady who was talking to me that I'm just glad I was able to buy tickets at all!" (Actually, they did turn out to be pretty good seats.) These conversations with people who are barely able to speak comprehensible English take place all the time--with tech support for computers, service requests for appliances, and any number of telephone dealings with large companies. Maybe they figure that most people are doing business on-line, anyway; so the telephone personnel are not chosen very carefully. And of course, the labor is much cheaper if you can channel calls to some guy living in a thatch--roofed hut in India or Pakistan! Still, it would be nice if American companies would give a thought now and again to genuine customer service by making sure that the customer service representatives really did provide some old-fashioned customer service--and do it in the language most of us in America actually understand--genuine, clear, properly enunciated, English! Is that asking too much? By the way, the $300 hold meant that if I put the cost of the rental car on my debit card, $300 of my bank account would be frozen for fourteen days after I turned in the car. I think we'll just go with the good old credit card instead!