I tried to watch the Mailchimp instruction video about menijing yer campeen. I meant, of course, managing your campaign, but it sounded like that.
Which is why I’ve just had to abort listening to the Mailchimp training webinar thing.
I just couldn’t stand the mangled vowels any more.
It was odd. Lockdown or not, if you’re going to have presenters then maybe don’t have pictures of them looking as if they got their clothes from a skip behind the worst local charity shop. I’d say the same if they were men, but they weren’t. Given they were static photos and neither of them appeared anywhere else other than the intro up until the halfway point where I had to switch their voices off, I don’t know why they were in the webinar at all. What was the point?
But the voices. Both American, which apart from New Hampshire isn’t a bad thing in itself. Seriously. Have you ever heard a rural New Hampshire accent? It leaves you thinking how sad it is that mental health programmes are so few and far between in the USA. None in rural New Hampshire, apparently, given the evidence of your own ears.
But like omigard? That rising inflection? At the end of every sentence? Like seriously? What’s it for? It always sounds like a question, which is irritating enough. But in a how-to-do-this-thing video, as we old people call anything with moving pictures on a screen, we don’t want questions. We’ve GOT questions. What we want are answers. Not answers?
Even more weirdly, the woman couldn’t say permission in any context whatever without pronouncing it as permission? With the rising inflexion at the end? For no reason? This is a time when WTUF FOR??? really is a question.
It wasn’t just that one of the women doing the presentation not only managed to speak in a monotone almost all of the time except when she was doing an irrelevant rising inflection. It wasn’t just that she did it every time she said permission?
It wasn’t even that she chewed up her vowels so that manage your campaign became menij yer campeen and by the time you’d worked out what she meant she was half-way through the next mangling.
She diverted attention from the message. So far as I can see it, and I know this is ridiculously old-fashioned, language is to communicate. If it doesn’t do that, if people can’t understand what you’re saying, because of the words you use, the speed of delivery, or the way you say things, then it’s failed. You haven’t communicated. You just made a noise. Like a farmyard animal.
I wanted to know what they had to say at Mailchimp. I wanted to understand more about how to use it. I just wish they’d understood how to tell people in a way that didn’t have them switching the sound off.
