What was your first clue, lady?

Once upon a time, your host applied to a graduate school and requested that he be considered for a position teaching Spanish as part of the aid package. He then discovered that they had a particularly effective strategy for figuring out just how good his Spanish really was: one morning, he received a call which woke him up, from a lady speaking only in Spanish. Being groggy and annoyed at being woken, poor SC proceeded to flub the interview, which largely consisted of trying to elicit a conversation from him in Spanish. Oops. In retrospect, SC has mixed feelings about this as an interview strategy -- it weeds out the non-fluent quite well, but it doesn't really account for the possibility that someone might not want to be cooperative for reasons having nothing to do with their fluency, and everything to do with getting what sure sound like wrong-number calls from strangers at inconvenient times.

However, SC has lately tried to be more accommodating of people who call speaking a language other than English. In the last 24 hours, your host has received a veritable flood of phone calls looking for someone who obviously: 1) speaks primarily Spanish, and 2) is in something less than the good graces of the people inquiring about his availability. Victor Whatever-your-last-name-is, you are so dead when the people calling for you catch up -- good thing they keep getting someone who has never made your acquaintance instead.

What these events have in common is the bizarre conversation that just occurred, and which SC has thoughtfully transcribed for your amusement:

SC: Hello? [no answer] Hello?
Caller: Hola?
SC: Yes?
Caller: Hola?
SC [now impatiently]: Yes, hello, what do you want?
Caller: No habla español? (Don't you speak Spanish?)
SC [getting it now]: Sí, yo hablo español, pero no es mi lengua primera. (Yes, I speak Spanish, but it's not my first language.)
Caller [angry]: Perdona? (Excuse me?)
SC [otra vez, con enfasis]: Sí, yo hablo español, pero no es mi lengua primera. (Excuse you!)
Caller: [click]

Based on the increasingly enormous call volume in Spanish in the last 24 hours, your host is reasonably sure that the lady on the other end would have liked to speak to Victor. SC would also like to speak to Victor, and would probably do to him for free whatever these folks are being paid for. But the fascinating thing about this call isn't that it was an obvious wrong-number issue (well, a fraudulently given number, not so much a wrong one). It's that rather than trying to ask for Victor, the lady on the other end tried to figure out whether or not SC might be hiding him by determining whether or not his language use marked him as the sort of person Victor would be associating with. Caller ID tells SC that this wasn't the first time this particular person has asked SC about Victor -- at some point, shouldn't she figure out that if the person on the other end of the call doesn't sound like Victor, and doesn't behave like Victor, it probably isn't Victor?

Comments

[Aki]

I get similar repeated calls from a Spanish speaker trying to find someone that probably gave them the wrong number, yet still insists on calling me! What I do (once I realize that I need to communicate in Spanish) is simply explain to them (in my broken Spanish) that they have the wrong number -- their response is usually "Oh, I'm sorry" (in broken English). Of course, what they end up doing is calling me right back. When they realize that it's me again, they immediately hang up -- how rude!

P.S. If you want to make an inverted question mark (¿) on Windows, simply hold the Alt key down and type 0191 on the numeric 10-key pad on the right side of your keyboard.