"Press 'one' for English"
Aug. 27th, 2010 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
milktreeWhy do people get *so* outraged by this? "People" in this case tend to be right of center, a little libertarian (not the good kind), and male (although I suspect that's just bad sampling.)
They're not just too lazy to press a button, or they'd bitch about automated phone trees in general.
So, they're somehow threatened by "them" being here. As if all these people with European ancestry somehow deserve to have *their* native language be the only option. (and not any of the hundreds of American Indian languages) As if somehow *English* is more betterer than German (which was nearly the national language) or French, or Gaelic, or Italian, or Swedish.
These tend to be the same people who decry government intervention and applaud the free market. Yet, the free market is what caused this in the first place. Companies want to appeal to the most customers, so they offer their annoying phone-trees in multiple languages. Imagine if the companies used telco reverse-lookup data to know what part of the country you're calling from, or even what part of town, and offered the local language only (or first). Call from southern Florida, you'll get Spanish first. Call from Watertown, you'd be offered Armenian. Call from northern Maine, you'd get "French" (Canadian French), call from New Orleans, you'd get a different "French"
They're not just too lazy to press a button, or they'd bitch about automated phone trees in general.
So, they're somehow threatened by "them" being here. As if all these people with European ancestry somehow deserve to have *their* native language be the only option. (and not any of the hundreds of American Indian languages) As if somehow *English* is more betterer than German (which was nearly the national language) or French, or Gaelic, or Italian, or Swedish.
These tend to be the same people who decry government intervention and applaud the free market. Yet, the free market is what caused this in the first place. Companies want to appeal to the most customers, so they offer their annoying phone-trees in multiple languages. Imagine if the companies used telco reverse-lookup data to know what part of the country you're calling from, or even what part of town, and offered the local language only (or first). Call from southern Florida, you'll get Spanish first. Call from Watertown, you'd be offered Armenian. Call from northern Maine, you'd get "French" (Canadian French), call from New Orleans, you'd get a different "French"
