Maybe this makes me sound regionalist or sexist, but when you’re calling technical or customer support and you get a woman with a Southern or Midwestern accent on the line, don’t you just say “Thank you, God”? They are invariably the friendliest, most helpful, most knowledgeable people working in any given support department. Men, people who sound like they’re from a big city or the East Coast, and people with foreign accents–you might as well hang the hell up. But talk to some woman who sounds like she might have been in a Wal-Mart commercial and not only will your problem get fixed, but you’ll probably end up paying less money for more service and maybe even get a free hat or something. It’s uncanny. It’s to the point where if I get through, I’m just going to ask to be transferred to the person who sounds the most like Dolly Parton.
Speaking of accents, my in-laws are from West Virginia. This means that very early on in my relationship with The Missus, a lot of inbreeding & redneck jokes were employed. This also means that only slightly less early on in my relationship with The Missus, I spent some time in the local hospital traction unit. I’m glad I learned that lesson the hard way, though, because (though maybe the last paragraph runs counter to this, but what the hell! I contain multitudes) nothing makes you sound like more of an asshole than making fun of someone because they sound different–particularly if they sound Southern or country or Noo Yawk/Noo Jurzey. Time and time again my somewhat unreconstructed “liberal” coworkers say things to the effect that they hate Bush because they don’t like listening to him talk, and they were absolutely merciless to Jessica Lynch (Private First Class Lynch to them, thank you very much) basically because she’s an Appalachian who never took a course on public speaking. All those much-vaunted egalitarian ideals of so much of the Left seem to disappear when confronted with a voice that twangs (or, on the flip side, says things like “whaddayagon’do”).