That's it, I'm moving to India...

if for no other reason than to save my fellow English speakers a lot of wasted time and frustration by talking to people who, let's face it, are nearly impossible to work with. Let's forget their cultural differences for a moment (you know, that whole men talking down to women thing...hey I have to talk to Dell all the time, don't tell me it's not like that) and focus on the very fundamental COMMUNICATION BARRIER that exists between people who don't speak English and people who are trying desperately to understand them.

I had the misfortune of speaking with a "Delta representative" this evening to request a flight for my daughter to visit her father in Florida for Christmas.
Now, I'm not a prejudiced person. I have a fairly open mind. I am all for diversity and all of that, but when I'm sending my daugher on a plane by herself to the other side of the country, I would prefer to speak with someone who wasn't reading from a script in broken English and an accent so thick I couldn't cut it with a knife.

Not only did this person repeat everything I said, causing me to have to repeat myself each time I said something (because she was talking instead of listening), but when I asked for earlier/later flights she read her lines WORD FOR EFFING WORD. Instead of just saying "yes we have an earlier flight" or "no there are no later flights" she would say...

"I can confirm a seat on a Delta flight departing from Seattle on the twenty-first of December two thousand and four at eight forty in the morning and connecting through Atlanta, Georgia and arriving in Jacksonville, Florida at six thirty six in the afternoon".

WTF?? First of all, since when is 6:36 in the afternoon? Second, WHY THE HELL can't she just tell me yes or no?? Does she get paid by the word?

At one point, near the end of the reservation, after I had been on the phone for a half hour with this woman, she asked me if she could confirm my daughter's flight to Las Vegas....that's right LAS_BLOODY_VEGAS...as in NEVADA. Seriously doubting that my daughter would reach Jacksonville at all at this point I told her to put the reservation on a "courtesy hold" so I could call back tomorrow and hopefully talk to someone who could make the reservation without reading it from a book, or a script, or whatever it is they use to train these people.