Phone Follies...

Calling again today for Florida's Amendment 4, which will, hopefully, reinfranchise over a million Floridians. People are not picking up as they had earlier in the cycle, but one South Asian man was rude about my accent, which stung a bit as he took some time to get specific. On one hand, though, I get it...he is probably in the epicenter of bitching about Indian voices on customer service lines and the like...maybe he's waited half his life to say that to someone from the dominant culture(at least, allegedly) and I blundered right in. Once the insult subsided, it reminded me of when my mom got in a car accident with a dude on a motorbike and my name was on the paperwork.
The adjuster would call me all the time, trying to psych me out about how injured the guy was, and how he had a kid, and, you know...try to get me to admit something or something like that.(Which I couldn't have even done, even if it wouldn't have been both stupid and self-demolishing...I wasn't there.) Anyway, Justin The Adjuster wasn't great at research or something, because his final gotcha was something like "Ms. JaNECKE, you don't understand...this poor man's *life's* been affected...he can barely hop."
I  wanted to tell him that would have been an upgrade for me, especially once I found out that I didn't have enough coverage to get the lift fixed(My policy on current van does...the more you know!) but I'm not sure I had the guts to say it in real life.I was a very different Crip in 2001.
If I did, I'm not sure he would have believed me, because , you know, aren't there *places* for people like that? And I made sense on the phone...surely that means I can get around, right?
Ironies aside, I feel good about this part of my work, but there were some problems. To wit:
-Restoration sounds like "registration" enough that I'm sure I said it wrong a number of times.
-Sometimes those electronic dialling programs aren't All That.
-it can be difficult to cut through 150 years of voting history in the 40 seconds the average busy American gives you before deciding if you are a pain in her ass or not. Especially if you are really trying to project and sound warm and all that, at the same time that you don't want to sound like you are selling them something.