Habran Pasando Malos Ratos Tratando de Aprender
Trip Start
Aug 08, 2008
1
14
42
Trip End
Oct 12, 2008
Puriscal,
Costa Rica
Thursday, September 11, 2008
One of the students asked me to come back after class so she could practice conversation with me, and I offered to go one better and come back for the after-lunch portion of the class. I got to meet Nata, a former student who now works in Western Union's call center. She talked about the pleasurable aspects of her job: the experience of meeting so many different people around the world, the opportunities for advancement (she's planning to learn Portuguese next, and the company is paying for her courses), and the satisfaction of helping someone in dire need-say, a mother waiting on her husband's money transfer so she could buy food for the family, or a traveler stranded in a foreign land. I cringed when she related the story of her most difficult call: a racist dipshit American who assumed she was Mexican (because of course there are no other countries where Spanish is spoken) and refused to accept her answer that his intended recipient was not allowed to receive wire transfers of funds (this happens sometimes when someone has a criminal record, or was previously a victim of identity theft), and spent two hours berating her and her supervisor.
The reasons these jobs are so coveted, I found out, are that they pay extremely well-some doctors make less than some call center employees-and the hours are very flexible. There's quite a diversity of skill levels in this class; some of the students, I'm certain, will be ready for this type of work when they graduate in December. Others I'm not so sure about. As a native English speaker, I have a hell of a time trying to understand some other native English speakers on the phone sometimes, without the aid of facial cues and body language, and with the hindrance of less-than-ideal connections. I also know how frustrating it can be to try to understand someone with a heavy accent-even if their English is very good-when I call tech support to find out why my monitor went blank and end up talking to someone in India.
We spent some more time working on the passive voice, and I will confess that the students stumped me with a "why" question. Native speakers are good for telling you how to say something, but we often suck at explaining why it's said that way, and not another way that would seem to be more in keeping with the conventions. The active voice sentence was "They must have hidden the treasure." The passive voice sentence should, of course, read, "The treasure must have been hidden." But why "have," and not "has?" "Treasure" is singular. I had to worry that in my head for a few solid minutes; I realized that, if you left out the word "must" and therefore the element of uncertainty, it would indeed be "has;" i.e. "the treasure has been hidden." So the "must" must change it. The teacher was able to identify the "must" as a modal (a word I'd completely forgotten) but couldn't articulate the rule, either.
English is effing hard.
