1.30.07: Sugar-Free in the Home County ‹ Blog

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.
Fran Lebowitz

Sugar-Free in the Home County

January 30, 2007

I have decided to go off sugar—not completely, mind you, because everything seems to have sugar these days and I already spend too much time squinting at labels and tossing things back onto shelves. No, I am just sort of going off sugar, meaning I’m cutting back on cookies, sweets, and sugared drinks. I’d like to say that I’m trying to lose weight or prevent diabetes or something noble and healthful like that, but the truth is, I have developed a raging addiction to herbal teas… which I drink with five lumps of sugar per cup. Five. Lumps. So I need to cut back on sugar in other areas of my diet, to keep me from going into some kind of sugar overdose.

The other day, while going through a huge backlog of e-mails from my mailing lists, I was reading a multi-person kvetch session on one of my work-related lists regarding computer manufacturers and their lousy tech support—and, of course, which ones had outsourced said tech support to India. Fortunately, there was no real bitching about funny accents or stoopid foreigners or anything racist like that… until one lady put in her two cents about how she hated that American companies were hiring foreigners, and that she’d had a “horrible” experience with a Mexican drive-through attendant at her local McDonald’s (“It was horrible… It was awful.”). So I was snickering a bit at her posts (because hey, close-minded people are just plain funny sometimes), and then... then I read her next post (sic, sic, sic, of course):

You will not believe this. I am so upset about doing business with non-English speaking employees you hit a very sore spot with me so I just call the McDonalds up here to complain about my experience Friday. The manager hung up on me when I explain my experience Friday and stated to him that I don’t care if he employee people from other counties I care that they don’t understand English.

At which I spit my drink onto the monitor (hey, it can actually happen!), then wiped it off while wondering if I should even be laughing at this—either the woman’s a moron, or a non-native English speaker herself. But of course, the implication in all her posts was that she was a native speaker, born and bred... All I can say is, people who write like that have no right to bash other people’s English skills. I don’t care if he employee people from other counties… Oy.