Language Corner Post – Spanish

For the past three weeks I have been working at a call center as a telemarketer that qualifies leads for businesses and colleges. The company is small but rapidly growing and the call center itself is split into three departments: finance, medical, and education. Because of another business venture I’m in and a no compete contract I’m under, I couldn’t work in the finance department and medical just confuses the crap out of me, so I settled on education. It felt like a no-brainer, I had experience dealing with financing education due to my background as a pell processor in my university’s financial aid department and I’m all about expanding one’s horizon’s through seeking knowledge. Now I like the people I work with and what we do is simple as dirt, however, and no offence to professionals who work in this field, this has got to be the most soulless way to make a living I’ve ever experienced, and I worked in retail.

The workday is extreeeemly long when you have to deal with monotonous calls; the way our client generates their leads seems shady, like class action lawsuit shady, I won’t elaborate any further. We share our leads with other, rival companies so when we contact people who’ve already been contacted by another call center, they all assume we’re all one, big, happy, parasitic family leading to acrimonious one sided conversations. To add insult to injury, whenever someone states they’re not interested and we disposition them as thus, we could end up calling them again (a maximum of 5 times) due to the business’ logistics and the dialing software’s logarithm, leading to more headaches. The only way to get off that merry go round early is to request to be placed on the do not call list (btw, if you ever find yourself being excessively called, just say “Take me off your list.” and by law the telemarketer has to comply or face down the barrel of a gun in the form of a $5,000 fine). It’s not something I see myself doing forever but it’s paying (most of ) my bills.

Two paragraphs in, right now you’re probably wondering, “What’s this got to do with Spanish?” You see, out of the 200+ people I autonomously dial, around 10% of them only speak Español. I explain to them that I don’t speak Spanish very well using a mix of what little I know (I have a couple of semesters of Spanish under my belt from college) and English, they try to explain they can only speak Spanish, I say “we seem to have a language barrier. I’ll update my records” (meaning we won’t be calling them again), there’s and uncomfortable silence and I say “adios” or “gracias” and end the call. It leaves me with an awkward feeling worse than going in for a kiss at the end of a first date only to have your date turn away.

If I could do all my awkward calls in person with this shirt on, I would.

So I decided I should finish what I started 9 years ago and master Spanish. I’m focusing on Latin American Spanish rather than the Spanish spoken in Spain (there’s a difference!) I’ve got my old Spanish textbook ¿Qué tal? and a couple of the advance vocabulary and grammar books from Cambridge’s Using Language Series

I spent $34.95 on the fifth edition of this book back in college and the seventh edition is going for $2.00 on Amazon. What a world…

I’ve decided to add two strict guidelines for learning a new language and posting on this blog. 1.) I decided that in all of my endeavors, I would not try to obtain perfection (although that would be nice) but rather usability; being able to hold a conversation with a native speaker as the foundation of the road to fluency. Trying to learn every aspect of any language would be madding and I’m not planning on holding any symposiums, although I do consider complete fluency in a foreign language as being able to give a lecture in that language. 2.) Every language corner post I draft from now on will only deal with what I found interesting about my studies. I feel that it would be draining to talk about the overall grammar and vocabulary of every language I study. I much rather talk about my experiences and focus more on the peculiarities I discover. Later!