Am I the only one?

I just wondered.

Am I the only person who thinks that the word "embarq" is silly?

How about the fact that phone companies staff their customer service lines with people whose first language is not English? Face-to-face, I have absolutely no trouble with accents - over the phone, the accents are difficult. If they're difficult for me, they're difficult for everyone, and I just think that help lines ought to be staffed by people who are nearly accent-free in the language of the callers. Of course, that means I assume that callers to our domestic phone companies will have American accents and language skills. But still. It drives me nuts.

And then there's this.

If I weren't already pretty irritated at the wait and the runaround, I'd probably think it was ... um ... ill-advised, maybe? I'm on hold, waiting for the phone company to pick up the phone, and there is an easy listening guitar cover of "Goodbye Doesn't Mean Forever."

(postscript: I take it back about the accents. An extraordinarily helpful, knowledgeable and useful man with an Hispanic accent just solved all my problems. Apparently, the problem was the sleepy and clueless Embarq employees (regardless of original language) - the MCI guy was great!)