Blog Archives
Straight Talk for Customer Service Reps
Heads up, customer service representatives! The way you talk to me is bugging me. Here are some of the phrases I could do without:
“With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
You say ‘with’ at the beginning of the sentence or at the end, not both. Better yet, don’t say this prissy phrase at all. Just ask me what my name is, please.
“I will be more than happy to help you.”
‘Happy’ would be more than happy enough. Don’t tell me you’ll be happy to help me. Just help me.
“I know exactly how you feel.”
No, you don’t. Anyway, I’m not asking for your empathy. I’m asking for your help. You don’t need to say, “I know I would be really frustrated if I couldn’t get on the Internet, use my apps, or make phone calls and text.” What I really feel you are doing with these empathic paraphrases is subliminally reminding me how much I need my cell phone and your service. Thanks, but I don’t need to be reminded that you have me by the balls.
Happy twenty-ten! (Not two-thousand-ten.)
Why do I hear people saying “two-thousand-ten” or worse “two-thousand-and-ten”? How laborious is that! People, there’s a reason Prince didn’t sing “Tonight we are going to party as if it were nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine”! He sang “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s nineteen-ninety-nine” because brevity is vernacular.
Sure, it was fine to say “two-thousand.” No problem. I was great with “two-thousand-nine.” But that decade is over, and time’s a-wastin’.
Let’s look forward. Ten years from now, are you going to say “two-thousand-twenty”? God, I hope not. It takes too much time. And the unity and brevity of twenty-twenty is so much cooler. Well, so is twenty-ten.
Don’t let ten years of starting years with “two-thousand” stand in your way. Break out, baby. Try something new. If you don’t start pronouncing your years with “twenty” now, you’re going to sooner or later. Might as well be among the cool people who do it right from the start.
Here’s to 2010. Make it a good one.
Betcha said twenty-ten!
Vague Language Facial Expression
I could really use your help to find one word — and it has to be a NOUN — for this facial expression people use in both English and ASL (American Sign Language) when they’re using Vague Language (VL). Maybe my facial expression / noun pairs will help you. Now maybe you can help me… thanks!
Dennis Cokely "Culturally Rich Realities" Workshop
This was the first time I had photographed a presenter giving a workshop in sign language. Those who know American Sign Language (ASL) can guess what Dr. Dennis Cokely was talking about. Those who don’t know ASL– well, they can have even more fun guessing. I don’t want to give away the content of his workshop to those who know ASL; rather, I encourage them to take his workshop themselves! As for those who don’t know ASL, there would be so much lost in translation if I simply said, “Dr. Cokely is signing X,” that I would be guilty of oversimplifying his message. And his workshop “Interpreting Culturally Rich Realities” is all about not oversimplifying any interpretation! I thank Dr. Cokely for his permission to photograph him as he worked.
While I don’t want to give too much of his workshop away, I do want to use these photos to help myself and others who took his workshop recall some of this repeated points. One of the things Dr. Cokely repeatedly discussed was having multiple lexical items in one’s “mental files” to choose from when confronted with signs or words that represented “culturally rich realities,” or words that are not easily conveyed from one culture/language to another in a 1:1 ratio.
As a photographer of a speaker presenting in ASL, I used the textual analysis and predictive skills I’ve developed as an interpreter to study Dr. Cokely’s rhetorical devices so that I would be prepared with my camera to capture him at the very moment when he would repeat one of his themes. As an instructor, he was very deft at using repetition to drive home a point.





