K as in....uh....uh....Kangaroo?

I'm not the biggest fan of talking on the phone.  Mostly because I am surprisingly bad at it.  This sounds stupid, but its true. When I talk on the phone I get tongue-tied and I fumble all over the place.  This isn't usually too bad during the course of a normal phone conversation where the other party is able to cut me off and direct the conversation far better than I am capable of, but all of the voicemail messages I leave are always awkwardly horrible.  Even as I am leaving the message I feel how stupid I am, but I am already too far in to turn back, so I just rush through the rest of the message I am leaving, quickly sign off and spend the next 15 minutes overanalyzing the awkward message I just left.

I also have this horribly high squeaky voice, which only gets higher and squeakier when I speak on the phone. Seriously, why do people even have phone voices? And why can't I control mine better?!!

Honestly, I never feel like a bigger idiot than when I am on the phone....except for possibly the one exception of when I'm on the phone at work, and unfortunately for me, a large part of my job requires me to answer phones.

Today at work a client  called and asked for some information. I ended up having to share a few email addresses with her and had to spell them out for her.Why is it so hard to come up with a words that start with the letter you are saying when you are spelling a word out for people? Is this just me? I've always struggle with it, I hmmm and haw for a good minute every time and sound like a complete moron as I scour my brain for a word, any word, that starts with that letter.

Today was even worse than usual because the client on the phone had an Australian accent and the first letter of the word was 'k,' so my brain brilliantly came up with, "K as in Kangaroo."  At which point I started mentally kicking myself hoping that she wouldn't be offended by the word that I had chosen (I realize it doesn't sound offensive, but still it wasn't the best choice to come to mind, and unfortunately it was the only word that came to mind).

More Things I Will Never Understand

1. The continued use of 2 sided dvd's. Such a pain! 

2. How few people find it disturbing that people are now in love with their phones. The Siri feature: CREEEEEPY!!!  perhaps its just the commericals that make it creepy, but the celebrities constantly talking to an operating system and asking their phone if it is raining, when they are looking out the window and SEEING rain is, oh, what's the word?...CREEPY!!  

3. Speed Dating. As much as I love small talk and being herded around by the sound of a bell, and being judged by my comments to random questions by random strangers in the space of three minutes, I would much rather be doing, well, anything else.  I think we're taking the wrong approach with locking up terrorists and waterboarding.  10 minutes of speed dating at an LDS singles ward will have those criminals whipped into perfect gentlemen, just so that they don't have to endure anymore of this real torture (come on ACLU, why aren't you fighting against this real torture. And yes, some people might argue that it was self-inflicted, but no, no it was not.  REalizeing that NO ONE likes speed dating, and yet, not realizing for themselves how pointless and annoying this acitivty is, the powers that be on the activities committee cleverly disguised the event by a fun, unique label, thus successfully hiding the ugly, twisted nature of the real activity)

4. Why the welfare system is still around. Ok, I realize that some people need an extra hand up, and I am all for giving it to them, and only them until they are back on their feet.  But I think its safe to say the the majority of the people on welfare should not be on it, but are too lazy and do not have a Jiminiy Cricket to tell them that their continued milking of the government is completely unethical and disgusting.

5. Insurance....  and Electoral Colleges. Believe it or not these two things are related: because they are both completely impossible to understand  No matter how often they are explained to me, in many different ways, I will NEVER EVER EVER EVER comprehend either of these.