Pressing matters

Every now and then one stumbles into one of the darker or dumber corners of Facebook and, before hastening back to saner, safer ground, takes a little time to explore the zeitgeist of the zany. So it was when I noticed a FB acquaintance had “liked” a group called I REALLY, REALLY HATE “PRESS ONE FOR ENGLISH, PRESS TWO FOR SPANISH”!!!

As a rule, I'm hard-pressed to endorse any cause that uses all-caps, repetitive adverbs and excessive exclamation marks to get its point across, even if the cause is cute babies, adorable puppies or chocolate.

Be that as it may, I knew what I was in for when I clicked on the page, then wandered a little farther afield to find a surprising number of other pages expressing similar resentments, ranging from garden-variety ignorance to gob-smacking stupidity to full-bore hate and bigotry. Several promoted this delightfully subtle piece of social commentary: http://bit.ly/GWXdW

A particular favorite FB page was titled: "Why do I Have to press 1 for English its my Country Bitch!!" (The creator of that page is obviously a student of history -- those last four words were Jefferson's working title for the Declaration of Independence; his original version also was replete with f-bombs and yo-mama pokes at King George. The history books always leave out the really good stuff.)

Reading some of the posts on these pages, one is tempted to hurl a cheap insult or two, but one should resist. Oh, what the hell – I can’t: It might be a little easier to take seriously some of these English Firsters if they knew how to use the language themselves; if, for example, they knew the differences between your and you’re and its and it’s, or how to use a damn apostrophe or quotation marks.

We should give the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that perhaps one reason some are so angry about having to “press one for English” is that it’s so painful, what with the injury they sustained when, while conducting a little proboscular maintenance, their head fell forward from the sheer weight of the idiocy in it and their nose hit squarely on a table, breaking both nose and the finger plunged second-knuckle deep inside it.

But such ad hominem attacks are not very constructive, are they? These are fellow Americans, after all. Real Americans, they’ll be happy to tell you.

I think I saw one of them at the store the other day. A couple of Hispanic women in front of me in the checkout line started conversing in Spanish. I did what I always do in these situations; I sidled a little closer to eavesdrop, trying to see how much of my high school Spanish I remember. Precious little, it turns out. But a guy in the next aisle fixed them with the stinkeye, clearly offended to hear someone within his precious earshot speaking a language other than English, or at least what passes for such in a Walmart checkout aisle (sorry; I promised to quit the ad hominem insults, didn’t I?)

He continued to glare, fume and even angrily fidget as the women talked, and I assume they finally noticed because I’m pretty sure one used the word “asshole” -- though, now that I think about it, she might have been talking about me, as by this time I practically had forced myself between them to hear better. (In addition to having lousy Spanish skills, my hearing isn’t so great.)

But back to those pesky bilingual automated phone systems that seem to be such a burden to some. Rather than be less inclusive, maybe the answer is to be moreso. What if we didn't stop with English and Spanish? What if we could press 3 for pig Latin, 4 for Appalachian hillbilly, 5 for Aramaic? How about offering choices like an Irish brogue, Col. Klink-style faux German, Klingon, dolphin clicks and whistles? A whole series of celebrity-voice options would be cool. For instance, I believe I'd enjoy my banking information delivered by Samuel L. Jackson, in all his full-"Pulp Fiction" glory. "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I break your concentration? Allow me to retort: Your &*%$-ing balance is $717.13."

Of course, to make things easy on our more digitally challenged fellow citizens, the default choice -- no button pressing required -- would be ignorant, bigoted nimrod-speak.

Never forget: Its their Country Bitch.