Zed

One of the things I'm doing here when I'm not with Abraham is helping his wife, Salem, with her shop. She and her colleagues put on a Bazaar every year with almost 100 vendors offering Ethiopian jewelry, art, weaving, etc. So they asked me to help them with the some of the logistics, which kind of ridiculously includes communicating with all the vendors. I say ridiculous because a lot of them don't speak English. Yesterday I called a bunch of them who don't have email addresses to tell them how to get registration forms. I kept going through the whole spiel of "Hi, this is Kristin calling from the Designers and Artisans Bazaar, and I wanted to make sure that you knew that registration has started…blah blah blah. Then I would stop talking, and inevitably they would say "…hello?" So I would hand the phone to Melat. And so it went.

Even worse than that are the people who *think* they can speak English and call me with questions about the Bazaar. For example…yesterday, this guy calls me and after we establish who I am and that I don't know who he is, he says "What have you done about the bazaar?" I was like um...I'm sorry, I'm going to need a specific question. He eventually explained that he was calling on behalf of someone else I didn't know who had not received the registration form that was attached to the email that was sent out to all the vendors from previous bazaars. So, just to clarify I said, "oh, so the form was not attached to her email?" He said yes. I said, "ok, sure, I'll just send it again if you will give me her email." He said "you need her email?" I said "well, yes." Then he told me she doesn't have an email address…but he said he would give me his instead.

To be fair, I usually find it kind of difficult to understand people spelling their email addresses over the phone, but this guy took it to a new level. It went a little something like this. His email address was like 10 letters long and he just rattled them off really quickly. The first four letters were abdi so we have some issues on the b and d – e? d? b? g? Once we sorted that out, he continued with zed-s-r-a…, and I didn't realize a lot of people pronounce the letter "z" as "zed" instead of "zee." So I was like whoa, I'm sorry, what was that?

Guy: zed.
Me: like z-e-d?
Then he starts yelling.
Guy: No! zed!
Me: …
Guy: hello?
Me: at?
Guy: No! zed! Zed!
Me: z?
Guy: Zed!

Then he just keeps spelling as if I've gotten it. So he piles on a few more letters and asks me to repeat it. Clearly I got something wrong because he says no, and starts spelling again. When he got to the zed, I stopped him and was like I'm sorry, hold on just a second. I hand the phone to Abs who has been sitting in the car with me the whole time. He pulled over, and they yelled it out in Amharic, and we were on our way. Whew.