Written While The Meeting Starts

I call in and the coordinator is talking.

"... and I don't even--"

Beep!

"Hello, who just join?"

"This is Don."

"Hello, Don."

"Hi!"

Silence. Extended silence. I open Live Meeting and nothing is being shared. A full minute passes.

Beep!

Silence. It's weird. You never know if they're just being relaxed about starting, or have gone on mute and are discussing secret things. Of course we are all one big happy corporation so there are no secret things. But who knows what goes on in the minds of the inscrutable transpacific--

Beep!

More silence. I guess we're waiting for someone whose presence matters. Live Meeting has four attendees, then six, then eight. More beeps, more silence. She doesn't ask about them. Why did she ask about my beep? Was my beep different somehow? Did my phone beep with an American accent?

Ah, we start. I must listen carefully. The phone system muffles people and everyone has an Asian accent of some sort or other, including the two other guys based here in the States. It's not uncommon for each sentence to be about one third incomprehensible to me and another third context-based guesswork on my part.

Honestly, I am very impressed when folks for whom English is a second or third language listen to folks for whom English is a second or third language, and whose first languages are radically different, and who can understand one another better than I can understand either one. Imagine a gentleman in Bangalore explaining technical matters to a lady in Beijing while I am listening in California, and I have a hard time understanding either one yet they have no apparent difficulty understanding each other. It's frustrating. Makes me feel like nothing but a dumb old white guy who never got out of Mayberry and I hate that because I grew up in a famously cosmopolitan college town surrounded at all times by folks from all over the world. This should be like nothing to me. Urgh.

Ah, we have a visitor from a circuit design group explaining the root cause at the silicon level of an issue that, as is often the case with issues that come to my attention, was discovered during customer test. In other words, a great big OEM that provides a lot of our revenue found the problem that's our fault before we could. We really hate when that happens. Normally, or at least preferably, we find our own mistakes and fix them before anyone else finds out. Anyway, he's in Texas and speaks with what to me is a slight Hispanic accent despite the fact his name is entirely Italian.

You wonder why I am fixated on accents. One reason, it's cause I can't tell you what we're talking about so I say what it sounds like. Another, I'm not always a very effective teleconference guy and I've isolated thick accents as a reason why. If they're going on and on in excruciating detail about verifying adjustments to factory test parameters (which has little or nothing to do with me) and they are doing it in the particularly difficult accents of Malaysian Chinese, I easily lose the thread and wind up faffing about on the internet and undercutting my career prospects and I end up a permanently unemployed old fart in his fifties because who the hell would hire a fifty-plus white guy to do engineering work? Get real, people. You can get twice the energy at half the cost if your prospects speak putonghua or yue and have their green cards. They're more focused, too, and probably got better grades. So to avoid that scenario I'm being more aware of accents and how I should avoid letting them enable me derailing myself. Clear? No? What?