The fellow who took my second call was polite, far more knowledgeable in the inner working of computers than I, and almost impossible for me to understand.

Part of the call went something like this:

IT (As I heard it): rapid unintelligible talk about a file name.

Me: Was that t-e-v dot d-a-t?

IT: rapid repetition of individual letters.

You don’t realise how close v,t and d are in sound until you have to struggle like this.

Of course it went both ways. After I’d asked “Was that t-e-v dot d-a-t?”, he couldn’t say yes, because he didn’t understand me. So instead he repeated what he’d already said. But I still couldn’t be sure. I didn’t want to delete an important file by mistake.

I tried again.

Me: Was that T for Tom, E for elephant, V for Victor dot D for David, A for alpha, T for Tom?

IT (As I heard it): That’s D for Dom, E for elephant V for Victor dot D for David, A for alpha, D for Dom.

While my brain was registering that D for Dom didn’t make sense in the context of the sentence, (he was saying T for Tom) I was not able to concentrate on the next bit of the rapid fire instructions.

So I seemed to be always one step behind him. No doubt he was silently cursing the dumb female on the other end of the line who was so slow to comprehend instructions. In my defence I will say I’ve had numerous calls to different IT people, and I am usually able to follow in what I think is a reasonable way.

The upshot was I lost my confidence. Half way through the call, I found myself asking him to repeat what he’d said, even when I thought I understood, to buy myself some time. I asked him to explain how to do things that in an unflustered state I would be capable of doing almost with my eyes closed.

At this point there are some people I know who would have lost their temper and become rude, but I really needed this problem fixed in a hurry so I tried a different path.