HOW DO I COMMUNICATE?

Last month, I called my landscape guy to come and clean my yard, after a long hard winter. Every year he sends his crack team over, and the pull out all the leaves from around the pool, pick-up all the debris from the trees that has fallen like branches and leaves, and that kind of thing.

This past winter when I closed the pool, I put in these water containers around the edge to hold down the tarp that covers the pool. Years past, I had water bags, but when the geniuses from the landscape company came to do the fall cleanup, the bags would inevitably burst in some cases, causing the pool cover to shift and slip down into the water. This past winter, the pool stayed covered perfectly, since the containers held up very well indeed.

So the big day arrives, the property is swarming with men cleaning the property, the dog is going out of her mind barking, and we decide we will leave to do a little shopping. I look into the pool area and notice that the pool hasn’t been cleaned out, but a good portion of the pool cover is now in the pool! On top of that, they the geniuses from the landscaper now have some of the water containers opened and the covers all over the pool! I am very angry, and as I am prone to do, I call the owner of the landscaping business, and leave a message. I list a litany of complaints and hang up, and we get in the car to shop. I see the landscape crew is still on the street to do my neighbors property, so I call one of them over, roll down my window and he looks at me scared.

“Are you guys going to clean out the pool?”

No answer. I look at another guy; he holds up his index finger to me and walks over to the landscaper truck where a conference is being conducted. Suddenly, another genius comes over, slowly approaching my car, looking like he is afraid to see what lies in store for him.

“Are you going to clean out the pool?”

He looks nervous and says something I cannot understand because he doesn’t speak English! Now my irritation has reached a new level, and I am really riled.

Why would you send a work crew over that does not have at least one person in charge to speak my language? Is it because the labor is cheap?

More and more I am running into this nonsense, where they do not speak my language in my country. It is starting to feel like I’m in some foreign land!

If we are to assimilate, there must be some respect for what my ancestors did many years ago. That is the slurs and slanders that were perpetrated upon them because they spoke Italian. What I’m saying is, my grandparents demanded their children speak to them in English, that they themselves would learn the English language, and not once consider this country making everything in English/Italian, where ordinary Americans could not communicate with each other.

Today’s Spanish immigration makes them like ordinary Americans: true to the tradition of immigration into this country like all the Italians, Poles, Germans and French that make up the fabric of this nation, they are not coming here to adopt this country, but to be adopted by this country. I don’t want my country to be bi-lingual, although it will eventually be, and Spanish/English one, where Spanish will eventually eliminate English!

But even more infuriating is the mess they made, and that I had no one individual who could own up to it, because I couldn’t speak their language in my country! They have a responsibility to do the job right in any darn language, and if they think they can hide behind the language barrier, they better think again.