My friend Mansour - who will be interning at Boeing in the spring - had a conference call with his future employer and he asked me to listen in. The experience lived up to the horrible reputation that conference calls have earned. Example: The first 30 minutes was trying to make sure everyone was on who was supposed to be on.
As a native English speaker I like hearing other native English speakers talk to non-natives. What words do they choose? What words do they use and then try to explain because they want to make sure they were understood? The Boeing woman did an excellent job.
At the end of the call came time for questions and there was a question on one of the forms about "pay stubs" from current employers. An Emirati asked, "What is that?"
The Boeing woman explained that it is not a big deal but please include any pay stubs you have from your current job. The guy said, "I don't know the term 'pay stubs' means." I laughed out loud; of course he had no idea what a pay stub is because they don't have them here. Here you get 100% of your pay. There are no deductions for taxes, insurance or anything else. Your pay is your pay.
In another part of the call she was covering details of what it takes to bring a dependent to the US. After she found out that nobody on the call had any dependents she still spent ten minutes talking about it. I blurted out, "Oh, dear god move on!" Then I looked at Mansour and said, "Please tell me you have your phone on mute." He responded with big eyes to which I was thinking, "Oh, fuck..." Then he smiled and showed me it was on mute.
On Friday I was at a CLE (continuing legal education) and I turned to the lady next to me who was about to give a presentation. Here is how the conversation went:
ReplyDelete"I see that you are going to talk about the guidelines."
"Yeah, but not just lecture. I'm going to try and make it interesting."
"Good, because the last time we had that conference call about them. I totally fell asleep."
"Do you mean the conference call that I ran?"
"Um. No?"