Quiet evening. You’re at home, and sud­denly, the phone rings. You :

a) Run towards the phone, drop­ping what­ever was in your hands, and hope for a good con­ver­sa­tion with a friend

b) Abruptly end the con­ver­sa­tion you were hav­ing on your cell phone in order to pick up the land­line — calls are a seri­ous busi­ness here.

c) Bury your face in your hands and sight : “not again…”.

I’m clearly a “c”.

It all started in high school. Sud­denly, the phone became more than a black plas­tic thing. Yet most of time I despised it. Why wasn’t it ring­ing ? Should I call him ? But he said he would call. Why wasn’t he call­ing then ? Was the phone bro­ken ? Off the hook ? Power out­age in the neigh­bor­hood maybe ? He did say he would ring, right ?

By the time I fin­ished high school, he still hadn’t called and I had grown to dis­like phones. Stu­pid use­less objects if you want my opinion.

I then got my first job in Hong Kong. My biggest chal­lenge wasn’t being an 18 years old lost in Tsimshat­shui: it was to han­dle my daily duties at Takyi com­pany. I was an office worker, a baby one. I could barely switch on a com­puter at that time but I had the lan­guage skills. So they let me learn.

One morn­ing, Lia, my boss, came to me :

– Now you arrive at 8:00 and take care of the phone for Qingqing.

Qingqing was the recep­tion­ist, the only one in the office who was actu­ally from main­land China. The oth­ers were from Macao, Hong Kong, Malaysia, or at least big Chi­nese cities like Bei­jing and Shang­hai. But Qingqing was from the coun­try­side — god knows what or who brought her to Hong Kong. As a result, she was the office’s poor lit­tle girl. The other recep­tion­ists, Isabella and Celia, made fun of the way she dressed, the way the talked and the food she ate. She could never get things right — and I could tell she tried hard. Like me. This was prob­a­bly why I was paired up with Qingqing. In my manager’s mind, I was a total fail­ure. I was too fat (by Chi­nese stan­dards), too tall (by her stan­dards), my nose and belly-button pierc­ings made her cringe every time she looked at me and I wasn’t wear­ing enough make-up. My clothes were odd too: Lia had been to Paris twice and she clearly remem­bered French women wore Chanel dresses and car­ried Louis Vuit­ton hand­bags — not Levis’ jeans and hand­made tote bag. All in all, I deserved to come ear­lier to work to cover for Qingqing.

The next morn­ing, I got up before my two room­mates and walked to work. I didn’t really feel like I was an hour early any­way, since Hong Kong looked busy 24/7. I picked up a cou­ple of coconut bread on my way and arrived in front of the intim­i­dat­ing build­ing in Tsimshat­sui. I keyed the code in (was it 1−2−3−4 or 4−3−2−1 ? Can’t remem­ber any­more…) and switched on the lights. A minute later, I was on front of my com­puter and the phone started to ring.

– Good morn­ing, how can I help you ?

– …

– Hello ?

– …

Hung up. Oh well.

I ate my breads. Checked my emails. Went for a smoke in the hall­way a cou­ple of time. At 9:00, the phone had rang about twenty times but I had no mes­sages. Peo­ple kept on hang­ing up on me.

Brac­ing myself for my Lia’s lec­ture. If I didn’t have any mes­sage for Qingqing, then it must be because I didn’t show up at 8:00 as agreed but at 8:55.

But she sur­prised me. Instead of men­tion­ing my lazi­ness (because she clearly remem­ber that when she vis­ited Paris, French were less effi­cient than Japan­ese, there­fore they were lazy — some kind of genetic prob­lem that I must have had inher­ited because I was very French indeed — are you fol­low­ing me ?) , she blamed my English:

– What do you say on the phone ?

– Er… “Hi, how can I help you?”

– Dumb ! They don’t want to talk to Eng­lish girls like you! They want Chi­nese, speak Chinese!

She actu­ally made a point. Although I wasn’t sure why I was sud­denly tagged as Eng­lish, I should have spo­ken Chi­nese. Silly me… I had assumed since we mostly worked in Eng­lish, I could speak it on the phone.

Lucky me, Qingqing hadn’t arrived yet, so I had a chance to make up for it.

– 喂、怎么可以帮助你吧?

– …

– Dumb, dumb !

What?

Oh yeah, that was my Lia behind me.

– I say Chi­nese, you speak pǔtōnghuà ! Chi­nese, I want you to say Hong Kong Chinese !

Right. Can­tonese, guǎngdōnghuà. Another bat­tle ahead…

– But I don’t speak Can­tonese! I learned Man­darin! It says on my resume: Mandarin!

– Lan­guage is will. If you want to speak Can­tonese, you speak Can­tonese. But of course, you never try to speak Can­tonese because your mind doesn’t want to speak Can­tonese. Can­tonese is more bet­ter. A lot.

Lia was from Malaysia. She has been liv­ing in Hong Kong for twenty years and although she spoke per­fect Can­tonese (as far I knew), she still couldn’t read any Chi­nese char­ac­ters. I had to read her the menu every time we went to restau­rant together. This was our biggest bat­tle: I should speak Can­tonese and I didn’t. I wasn’t even try­ing accord­ing to her.

Lia took a piece of paper and scrib­bled some pinyin (pho­netic Can­tonese) for me.

– This is what you say.

Good tim­ing. Already, the phone was ringing:

– 我…点可以帮助你？

– Isabella 小姐系唔系口？

– er… 等一下啊！

Good news: peo­ple talked to me now. And my accent seemed alright. Bad news: out­side the intro­duc­tion, I still wasn’t speak­ing — or under­stand­ing for that mat­ters — Can­tonese. Fuck. I only got the name of the recep­tion­ist in the sen­tence that fol­lowed. Thanks Isabella for choos­ing a West­ern name. I pressed 1 to trans­fer the call.

The fol­low­ing months were mis­ery. Every time the office had lunch, I was told to stay at my desk to take mes­sages. My Can­tonese didn’t improve but I quickly learned to spot names in the long sen­tences that usu­ally fol­lowed my — now per­fect — intro­duc­tion line. Every time the phone rang, I felt like unplug­ging it and run­ning away. I was still shy and I hated Lia for mak­ing me do that. I hated the phone for ring­ing that often.

When I arrived in Canada, I faced another prob­lem. I spoke both offi­cial lan­guages, which was already a good thing. Although it was tak­ing me a lot of energy to under­stand Eng­lish clearly over the phone. With­out body lan­guage, I was often lost in the details. And come to think of it, Que­bec accent didn’t work that well either. Words sounded dis­torted, I couldn’t tell whether the per­son was jok­ing and num­bers… well, num­bers don’t usu­ally agree with me, but accented num­bers were worse.

Too bad I had secured a con­tract in a call center.

My phone was ring­ing almost non-stop, and I couldn’t use the pause but­ton too much oth­er­wise my super­vi­sor was behind me back within sec­onds. But my head was con­stantly pound­ing. As soon as I was see­ing the blue “French” but­ton, I prayed that I’d get some big cities peo­ple, who usu­ally spoke with less accent. Eng­lish line? Please, not another guy from fuck­ing mid­dle of nowhere town with a bad connexion!

The mis­ery last a few months. I then worked as a recep­tion­ist, a sec­re­tary, a sales­per­son and I finally got a job as a teacher. Best part of it is, I never ever have to answer the phone. I do every­thing by email and I usu­ally tell phones lovers that I can’t be reached eas­ily because I’m in a class­room 6 hours a day. They don’t always under­stand me : “why don’t you get a cell phone then?”. I guess I should have them to read this posts.

And you. Yes, you. Please don’t call me. Just write some­thing below.

Related arti­cles:

1. How To Get Rid Of Telemarketing
2. Call Me (Not), Part II
3. How to Avoid… Phone Scams
4. (5+5) Things About Me
5. The Phone Booth

Tagged with: Humor � Working Girl � 白鬼子 China