You probably don't speak Spanish
A couple times, I've encountered an attitude toward foreigners in Spain that confuses me. The attitude is this:
"Even though I'm speaking to you in Spanish and you're speaking to me in Spanish, you must not really speak Spanish."
Here's Part I of what I mean:
Four years ago, when I was studying abroad in Alcalá de Henares, my friend and I went on a day trip to Madrid. At one point, we stopped at a restaurant to order ice cream.
Being eager to use our language skills with the server, we spoke in Spanish to ask about the flavors they had. The server probably heard our foreign accent and/or guessed from our appearance that we were "guiris" (a term for an Anglo foreigner) and answered us in English.
She didn't take into account that maybe we spoke some Nordic language and not English or that maybe we we were bright-eyed students who wanted to practice our Spanish. And she definitely didn't think about her English being worse than our Spanish.
But it kind of was. So she ended up having to point to the flavors on the menu, and we ordered.
Today, I made a call to my bank and tried to activate my new debit card. (My old one stopped being read by their ATM machines but worked perfectly fine in stores...)
So on this call, the voice for the automated menu asked me to select an option for why I was calling. I noted mentally that the message was easy to understand and that it contrasted greatly with the customer service line for the bus company, Alsa, which is fuzzy and difficult to understand no matter how many times the same recorded message replays again and again over Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. But that's another story for another post.
I pressed one for card activation services. But when the representative came on the line, I could hardly hear her. There was static every time she spoke and her voice sounded far away. For me, it's a bit harder to guess at what a person is saying when the majority of her sentence is covered up by static and she's talking in a language that I'm currently trying to perfect.
So I asked the woman to repeat what she said.
The woman tried again, "¿Con qué te puedo ayudar?" ("What can I help you with?")
"Quiero activar mi tarjeta." ("I want to activate my card.")
More incomprehensible speak.
I responded, "No te oigo muy bien por la conexión." ("I can't hear you very well because of the connection.")
She then asked me in Spanish if I wanted to speak in English. I told her again in Spanish, "No, it's just that I couldn't hear you because of the connection." But she kept asking if I wanted to speak to someone in English.
So it wasn't enough that I was explaining to her in Spanish what my problem was as well as listening to and answering what she was asking me in Spanish. In the end, I just said "uhhh" because I realized that it would be useless for me to say that I wanted to keep talking to her even though her reception was horrible. And she took that "uhhh" as a, "Yes, please transfer me. I don't really speak Spanish. That's why I only said, 'uhhh' to your last question." Why else would she have thought it might be better to transfer me to someone who may have the same connection problem?
"One moment," she told me. In English.
After she transferred me, I spoke with a representative in English, who incidentally had perfect reception.
At the end of the conversation (maybe because my pride was hurt; maybe because I want to point out all the shortcomings of customer service in Spain), I told the man that the previous call I was on had terrible quality.
And he asked, "Would you like the direct number to speak to someone in English?"
Ultimately, yes, I took down the number. If only for what I will label: The Line with Better Reception.
