FIFO

While waiting for my Chinkvirus jab yesterday at CVS, this Mexican woman came up to the pharmacist — a Chinese immigrant, as it happened — and started trying to tell him her problems with her Rx script, and also asked where could she find some product or other.

She could not speak a word of English.  When he asked her for her birth date so he could pull up her Rx record, she just stared at him blankly.  Then she repeated everything she’d said earlier, as though this was going to change everything.

Amazingly, the pharmacist actually made some sense of the second part of her speech, and said, “Aisle Number 8”, which was met with the same blank stare as before.

Then she started to get angry, and began her little speech again, only louder and irritably, whereupon he said, loudly, “ID?”

That she understood, and groveled around in her Mexican purse (a.k.a. a well-used plastic Fiesta shopping bag), then handed it to him.  He looked up her record — gawd knows what would have ensued had it been a fake ID or something — and shrugged.  “You can’t pick these up yet;  it’s too soon.”

Well, if “Aisle Number 8” was beyond her, that little explanation wasn’t going to fly.  So she grabbed her ID card from his hand, and stormed out of the store.

If immigrants to this country want to take a wild guess as to why they aren’t welcomed with open arms, this would be Exhibit #1.  What got me was not just this fool’s inability to speak English, but her testy attitude when the pharmacist couldn’t speak Spanish.  You would think that before coming to deal with a problem, she’d at least bother to learn a few English words to help her get her point across, but noooo.

What really got up my nose was that the pharmacist — also an immigrant — spoke excellent English;  he’d had to learn it in his mid-twenties when he came over fro China and enrolled at University of Texas to get his degree (as I learned when I was chatting to him afterwards).  In other words, he’d not only learned a foreign language but an entirely different alphabet, and earned a medical degree in that same language.  No doubt at some point he’s going to get a corporate reprimand for his lack of customer service skills.

I know that he probably moonlights as an agent of the ChiCom Party, but I’m still on his side.

And I am even more determined not to bother to learn Spanish (something I’ve been idly considering over the past few months).  Fukkem, and FIFO.

21 comments

  1. I’m surprised you got the shot at all, given the nature of the retards running that shit show. For my two cents: fake pandemic=fake “vaccine”. No thanks. But I suppose sacrifices must be made to welcome and nurture the vibrants, the joggers, and all the frooty and diverse folks that live under the rainbow. They can have first crack (and the last, for all I care) – at this miracle vaccine.

    As for me… I can read, do math, and understand science and statistics, so I will pass on the histrionics and such. I have better things to do.

  2. What I find interesting is that it’s only the south of the border (i.e. Spanish speakers from places that aren’t Spain) immigrants who seem to expect Americans to speak their language.

    Also that the same Europeans (and American Euro-wannabes) who get snooty about the fact that most Americans only speak English (even though you can travel almost the entire North American continent with that one language), but don’t treat the peoples from south of the Rio Grande with the same disdain for only speaking Spanish (or Portuguese if they’re Brazilian.)

  3. Here in the OKC area the standard response by those who lack English skills is to smile, nod, and then ignore you. I was returning to my car at the grocery store and a lady in a mini van pulled in next to me. If there had been one more coat of paint on either vehicle we would have had body damage. As she was unloading a whole village worth of kids I called out “Ma’am could you please move your car?” A smile and a nod. “Ma’am I can’t get into my car.” A smile and a nod. “Ma’am you are parked too close to me. I can’t get my car door open.” A smile and a nod as she herds her brood toward the store. At this point my racism and cultural insensitivity got the best of me and I shouted “If you’re going to drive in this country you should try to speak the language.” As she moved away I saw her head nod again.

    This arthritic old guy managed to crawl into the passenger seat and get across the shifter and console. I was again reminded that there isn’t much flexibility left in my body. If I’d been driving my old beater pickup I would have forcefully “adjusted” my driver door about a half dozen times into her nice mini van. The store parking lot had cameras so that would have been a bad idea but that eighteen year old Dodge 1500 was built like a tank.

    1. That reminds me of a recent meme that stated “no one smiles harder than a illegal who can’t understand a word you saying to him”.

      Lots of illegals here have selective language skills. That can speak enough English if you’re hiring them, but not understand a single word for any other interaction. And they absolutely know they can BS white people due to white guilt, but any other race and it’s no go, Pedro.

  4. An interesting observation except that it mixes up ethnicity with class and the actual difference between the two individuals is their social class. You actually see that especially clearly in both China and Mexico in work places (say between professionals/managers and line workers) everything about them is different in bearing and even height, and the professionals almost all speak English or some other 2nd language. It stands out much more clearly than most US work places.

    The difference we see here in the US from those groups is that if someone comes from south or the border, they are much more likely to be lower class, but the difficulty/cost of getting here from China means those individuals are much more likely to be the professional class. Thus the average discrepancy.

    1. Over my career I’ve worked with and met many that came over as refugees in their teens or as children – Vietnamese, Eritrean, Ugandan, Korean. They didn’t speak a lick of English when they got here. And to a person, as younger adults, they all spoke English well. None were shitting in linen in the motherland.

      Not all Chinese that come here are from the upper crust. read “Chinese girl in the Ghetto” by Ying Ma. I’ve never met one that was ‘upper class’.

      Although, you have a point when you say that the Mexicans are usually lowest of the low. Many of them come from backwaters, and don’t speak, read or write spanish but have their own dialect. It’s been my experience here in Texas that Castillian spanish isn’t a huge help.

      1. True enough, but not exactly my point. Race does not equal social classs and in many non-free societies economic class does not either (not totally here but the corellation is tighter).

        A free society (like we have) magnifies the impact of social capital, so whether native born or immigrants – if they value hard work, education, intact families, delayd gratification, etc all leverage into ecomic success while in many other countries not so much if at all.

        Even within native born Americans, if you control for the factors I mention above, the differences in economic success between races virtually disappears.

        1. I think you mean “a free society like we USED to have.” Valuing hard work, intact families, delayed gratification just means you’re not woke enough, and must be punished.

          Deplorable.

          1. You are right about such woke crap but it is not all encompassing, the numbers clearly show all of those things still lead at least moderate success, of course there is no guarantee to get rich anywhere.

            However, let’s not sugar coat the past either. The challenges are not the same now as then, but they were their either. To point one obvious one, my wife’s grandparents came here from Trinidad and the best job he could get was tending bar despite having an engineering degree just because he was very slightly black. Of course one of his sons went on to be EE professor (AKA – my father in law) after a career in the Navy, of course today if he had been in the Navy with a EE degree he would have been an officer. So that is all change for the better.

            So celebrate the good changes and fight the bad ones. I don’t know another strategy. That and keep in mind it is always something because Utopia is no place.

        2. I’m reminded of the comment made by (I think) Milton Friedman, when some Scandi idiot said to him: “In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”
          To which the response was: “In America, there are no poor Scandinavians either.”

  5. My paternal grandparents were processed at Ellis from Poland. My maternal ancestors were imported from Japan to Hawaii as plantation labor. None spoke a syllable of English when they arrived, but for damn sure figured it out once they were here. Follow their lead, douchebags.

  6. “No doubt at some point he’s going to get a corporate reprimand for his lack of customer service skills.”

    I’ve worked with Asians of all stripes, usually Vietnamese or Chinese. I love their absolute lack of empathy when it comes to human interactions, be they customers or employees. You are expected to behave a certain way, and if you can’t or won’t they have zero patience.

    Funny Chinese pharmacist story; I used to send my prescriptions to the Walgreens a mile south of the house. It’s across from a store I lovingly refer to as “Ghetto Kroger”. Their service went through an even suckier phase than normal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been ignored while waiting at the counter. The worst was the chick, (and they are always black, it’s the ghetto) that stared out the drive up, even leaning over hoping for a car rather than wait on me. I’d been standing there at least 15 minutes, probably more, the only person in line.

    She left. Walked to a coworker, said something, and left. Said coworker came to wait on me. I lit up the corporate complaint department. Even got a call from the manager apologizing, saying he just took over and was trying to fix things. Fair enough.

    Nothing really changed. I moved my stuff to mail order, and to the new shiny CVS they built across the street. I rarely go in there, except to pick up the wife’s drugs.

    One time there’s Chinese pharmacist. The girl starts to do the same thing, but the dude notices that there was a shift as a new car pulled in. He called her out, in front of all. “Hey Lacretia, take care of this guy. People in line here come before cars. You should wait on them first” or something to that effect. And he went right back to what he was doing.

    I’ve been back for the wife’s stuff, and noticed a distinct tightening of the ship back there.

  7. I had only been living here in Colorado a few months when I went through a Wendy’s drive through for lunch. The girl who took my order spoke very good English but when I pulled around to pay, the woman there cut loose with this stream of Spanish that threw me off guard for a moment. Now, there is nothing about my appearance nor demeanor that would suggest that it is safe to assume that I know much more about Spanish than what Speedy Gonzales taught me when I was a kid. I wasn’t having the best of days so I snapped back at her “ENGLISH!” To which she became very annoyed and a hardly intelligible collection of vaguely English sounding words came out and I put my cash away and handed her my debit card.

  8. If you want language problems, try calling Medicare customer service. Native ebonics speakers. Give me Bangalore over Baltimore anytime.

  9. When in Management Training for a young national food-service company a half century ago in SoCal, most of the clean-up and dishwashing was done by recent arrivals from South of the Border. When we needed someone new, you told the most senior of the back-of-the-shop crew, and he’d bring someone to be interviewed/hired. Language was not a problem as long as they had what could pass for papers. But, the working rule was that they were paid the minimum wage until they could come to the manager and ask for a raise – in English.

    BTW, Kim, when you encounter someone who refuses to speak and/or understand English, do you reply in Afrikans?

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