In the 4th day of game producer calendar, I’m going to reveal one thing about me. Today I got a call where I needed to speak English. I can write decent English, and can speak well enough to make my point, but there’s one tiny problem I have with spoken English: the alphabetic (especially listening to somebody spelling something).
When the call came, I confirmed my account number by saying the numbers one-by-one, and after I put effort into spelling my email address eventually I managed to say the whole address letter by letter. I felt like a lousy wizard who couldn’t spell his name, but I did it!
In one other call I needed to spell my name and the next time this person greeted me he used the word “Husso” (that’s pretty close to “Juuso”…).
And let’s not even go to the situation where once I couldn’t figure out what the persons email was, and he started spelling it to me… I didn’t have a clue what his name was no matter how hard he tried. I suppose this can be a tricky situation for others who aren’t native English speaking people, and won’t get easier before one puts effort into using & learning more.
My way for survival so far has been humor & honesty: works much better if you admit that you don’t have a clue what the other is saying (and perhaps make a small joke of it) rather than trying to fake it. (Works not only in spelling but in many, many other things in life and game production)
