Not A Problem At All

Yesterday, I was in the funniest conference call EVER.

This call was a "training" session for us. When I entered the meeting room, I promptly picked a seat near a screw that was sitting inexplicably on the table. I figured that having a "screw loose" was appropriate for me. Boy, I had no idea.

The guy on the other end of the phone had an odd accent. To me, he sounded like somebody doing a bad Pavel Chekov impersonation. Powerama had a different take - he said that the presenter sounded French Canadian.

In any case, we all agreed on one thing. It sounded like he was seeing this thing for the first time today, too.

His speech was full of odd pronunciations. Every time he said "campaign" it sounded like "contain". It took a full five minutes before I figured out what an "Ad Contain" was. "Documentation" was not just a 5-syllable word - it was very nearly 5 single-syllable words. And my personal favorite was when he said something about us "Foo-lowing along". "Foo" rhymed with "Who" in this case. I thought Big Dawg was gonna lose control laughing over that one.

Grammar was also an adventure. He was overly fond of "Uh...", so we were blessed with sentences like, "It will dynamically uh... gonna change uh... is one-time thing." At one point he mentioned checking a setting "to see if it doesn't broke the page." One time, he trailed off completely, never even finishing his sentence. He said, "We'll look over here, because I wanna know..." I helpfully concluded, "... where love is."

Big Dawg nearly cried over that one.

Every answer he would give to our questions would contain either "Not a problem at all", or "No problem at all." I'm pretty sure I don't believe it.

Adding to the chaos were constant sirens and alarms in his background noise. At one point, we literally couldn't hear him over a fire truck. Powerama asked, "Does he know his building is on fire?" Car horns blared at random intervals. Police sirens overwhelmed us once as well. Powerama took advantage of the moment, doing his own bad Chekov impersonation and saying, "Just a minute, it's INS!"

It took a while for my breathing to return to normal after that one.

But for me, the best moment was when he was giving out his cell phone number. I shall reenact:

Him: Do you have my cell phone number?
Golfer: I think I do somewhere, but...
Him: Is at bottom of all my emails.
Golfer: I don't have it here with me, go ahead and tell me now.
Him: I will tell you now.
Golfer: Yeah, that'd be fine.
Him: You can write it down.

Powerama turned to me in mock surprise and said, "Really?!?" I was a goner. I literally cried from laughing so hard. I couldn't even form words for several minutes.

Thankfully, he emailed us his doc hew men tay shun when the call was done. Maybe it'll be more use to us than he was.