I thought I had all my Christmas shopping done after I placed my orders on Amazon for the grand kids. But one of the items never showed up; a disappearing magic wand for my grand son Noah, who likes to put on magic shows at his grade school (to which, I may add with a soupcon of bile, I am never invited.)
When I called Amazon customer service I was connected with a comedy accent from Saturday Night Live. Here's how the conversation went:
Accent: Hi. My name is Bzzrhoin. May I have your gloink please?
Me: Huh? What do you want, my what?
Accent: Bpoin, please. I need your gloink for seguro pickles please.
Me: I can't understand you. You want my name maybe?
Accent: M;lknpo. That would be fretful yet.
Me: Uh, okay. It's Tim Torkildson. T.I.M. T.O.R.K.I.L.D.S.O.N. Got it?
Accent: Umvmvdp. Thank you. How can you help me Mister Forkerslum?
Me: That's not my . . . oh never mind. I didn't get an order; it never came.
Accent: Rouotnnt. Sorry and bother to you. I will winklenot the pruck, shall you do that?
Me: Lady, I can't understand a word you're saying! (I THINK it was a woman . . . )
Accent: (Strange noises, like an electrical discharge from a cat petted the wrong way). Nkriikk. Please hold me.
The line went dead and I hung up with a curse so sincere that seven blue devils appeared on my living room carpet to dance a Killarney jig before disappearing in a cloud of cotton candy. They left behind the smell of polyester yarn.
After a cup of chamomile tea and shot of epinephrine I was able to calmly survey the situation. Obviously, Amazon has outsourced their customer service overseas to some place like Lower Slobovia and engaged operators whose English skills are abysmal.
I could only shake my head. Why hadn't Amazon called on me to teach those poor souls English? After all, I have a TESOL certificate, and five years experience teaching the King's English in Thailand. In fact, I had invented a revolutionary pedagogy that left educators breathless and my students flummoxed. This happened during my early days in Thailand, before I met my girlchum Joom.
I called it Hollywood English. I based it on the fact that everybody the world over, including Thailand, thinks that the United States has made the best and most beloved movies of all time. So I would show my students some of the finest cinema old Uncle Sam has to offer, and we would dissect and discuss the dialogue until my pupils could speak English as well as Arthur Q. Bryon or Zasu Pitts.
I couldn't quit my day job at Sukhothai Thammathirat School, of course, to pursue this inspiration, so I offered Hollywood English in the evenings in my landlord's ground floor lobby, which I rented from him for ten dollars a month. It was full of potted bamboo and featured the hard teak wood benches that Thais consider the height of elegance and farangs can't sit on for more than ten minutes without losing all circulation in their legs. The landlord had a large screen TV and a connected VCR he kindly let me use.
I put flyers up on the concrete telephone poles that lined the soi (street) were I lived advertising my new approach to English, and the result was five twenty-somethings who showed up at the announced time and place, to promptly cross my sweaty palm with a hundred baht deposit each.
My first film was a little seven minute gem by Tex Avery, the maestro of outlandish cartoons, called "Symphony in Slang". It details the plight of a young man prematurely sent to the Pearly Gates to explain his early demise to Saint Peter. The cartoon interprets slang phrases literally, so that the viewer sees people actually 'chewing the rag' and 'bouncing a check'. My pupils could not make heads or tails of it at first, but we viewed it several times together and gradually they came to understand what it meant to 'be in a pickle' or 'play the piano by ear'.
In a few weeks time, after viewing "The Roaring Twenties" with Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, "Red River" with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, and "Singing in the Rain" with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, my proteges were greeting each other with a hearty "Howdy Tex!" and tap dancing across the lobby to proclaim "Moses supposes his toeses are roses" in mellifluous and arch tones.
Nonessential items such as grammar were swept away in the joy of being able to repeat verbatim Abbott and Costello's deathless duologue "Who's on First".
Such was their enthusiasm for this new method of language training that when I asked for my second one hundred baht installment all five students insisted I accept their promise of no less than two hundred baht each the very next week.
Strangely, I never saw them again after that. My supposition is that all five decided simultaneously to enter the Buddhist monkhood for a season. And before I could rustle up another crew of eager beavers I had to make a visa run to the Cambodian border, which resulted in a slight case of dengue fever that laid me up for a month. When I finally slid out of bed I found I had been replaced by another farang English teacher at the school; but the principal had kindly found me another position in Klong Tooey, a noisome Bangkok slum, where I was to teach dacoits basic Business English. My new position kept me extremely busy, not only lecturing but keeping my back to the wall to avoid stray daggers being thrust into it. I had to put my Hollywood English idea on the back burner, where it has remained to this day.
Still and all, I can't help thinking that today throughout the length and breadth of Thailand tourists are being told to 'keep your shirt on, bub' or asked 'cat got your tongue?' due to the influence of my brief tutoring efforts.
And if the highfalutin Amazon.com ever wishes to improve their customer retention agent's proficiency in English, they have only to ring my doorbell, hat in hand, and beg piteously while holding out large canvas sacks of greenbacks, for me to graciously lend them a helping hand.
That's all, folks!
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