06/25/14   I started being annoyed a few years ago at foreign customer service representatives. The only thing accurate about their title was that they were foreign.

I felt they were deliberately speaking in a way that made it impossible for me to understand—and I was a practicing speech pathologist for 30 years!

I’ve come to understand, that although their dialect may be unfamiliar, I’ve changed. My hearing is a little worse, the time it takes for me to process information is longer, and well, I just have less patience. So now, when I call them, I try to think of them as my mother—but I still become annoyed, but more with my slow decline into aging than with their English.