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After six phone calls in three days to the Michigan Avenue Marriott in Chicago, plus one of the St. Louis Hyundai dealerships, I have come to a perplexing conclusion: that phone receptionists are hired based on their unintelligibility. And you can’t attribute their unintelligibility to being non-native English speakers, either. The one non-native English speaker I talked to was the most understandable of the whole bunch. What is UP with that? At the Marriott, I could tell they were rattling off a script of some sort, and 3/4 of it I never did understand, even after 6 repetitions!
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Speaking of Chicago…Christian was up there for a conference the first part of the week. Sunday early evening he got on the El to go out to his brother’s place for dinner, and while he was reading the newspaper on his iPhone, somebody reached in between his head and that of the woman sitting next to him and snatched the phone and ran, scratching his face in the process. He was pretty freaked. But we were particularly thrown by the l0ss of communication while he was away, and on the road in a vehicle whose reliability is suspect.
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Julianna has discovered “singing.” A word that, as we are a family of musicians, I am forced to put in quotes. Alex, at this age, was singing on pitch. Julianna opens her mouth and yells…and yells…and yells. There’s a bit of pitch variation, along the lines of AAAaaAAAAaaAAAAaa. I laugh, and I withhold the wince, and I force myself not to plug my ears. You see, she sings only when someone else is singing, and she sings really loud, so loud that I almost can’t hold the train of thought together to remember the words to, I don’t know, Twinkle Twinkle. But I have to support her in her efforts!
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Add this to the list of things I don’t understand. The human body can adapt to so many things: crazy nurses’ schedules that go back & forth between days and nights, extreme temperature variation, very little sleep…so why, oh why, can’t my body figure out that it’s NEVER going to push a baby out, and it doesn’t need to relax my joints?
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Yesterday we had a packed day, in which one set of guests overran the next: neighbor girls with a school playmate of Alex’s (arriving just after 10a.m), the playmate with my sister and her little girls (around noon), Alex’s piano lesson, and finally my uncle. Of our underage guests, five out of six were little blond girls. I felt like I was in some alternate universe. 😉
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I’d like to plug a graphic design business run by my cousin Paije. If you need any design work done, check out her portfolio!
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Preview of next week’s blogs: I have some thoughts on Harry Potter…on self-image and beauty…and probably part two of my anxiety series. (Nothing like planning out a whole week in advance. Now I just have to write them!)
6 Responses
2 quick takes out of 7:
1. I was speaking to the liaison for my office alarm company on the phone, because the alarms had been set off at our office. 3 times I had to ask her to slow down her speech because she was talking so fast she was unintelligible. I really said to her, “Would you please slow down? You are talking so fast I cannot understand you.” After the 3rd time, I asked her to transfer me to someone who would speak at a rate that was slow enough for me to get the information I needed to manage the situation. I’m really glad it was not an emergency.
2. Jacob likes to make up songs as he goes along. The other day, he made up a song that lasted from Jefferson City to Ashland (15-20 minutes), when suddenly he stopped and said, “Oh man, I forgot the words.”
That’s hilarious. LOL
wow, i still can’t get over the blatant phone theft!
my sister sings, and i “sing” … there is a difference;)))
Look how productive you are, already planning out your blog entries! I’ve been uninspired as of late and blogging has felt like pulling teeth.
Also, your support of your children singing, is another demonstration of how deep mom love can go. I love it.
I feel I should clarify…those regular readers will know the whole significance of Julianna trying to sing, but for those who are dropping in, she has Down syndrome and at 4 1/2 isn’t talking yet…so attempting to sing is a big deal…even if it is painful to Mamma’s ears! 🙂
So which do you work on first: pitch or volume.
Sorry about the phone!