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.
