"My accent reduced a member to tears"

I first started working for the AA as an emergency breakdown call handler.  This meant that I had to work hard to water down my strong Black Country accent, as it’s not the easiest to understand if you’re not from the West Midlands. Well, I thought that I had succeeded until I got a call from a woman who was obviously from that area.

She called me from her home (which was now in North Staffordshire) saying that the family car wouldn’t start. When I asked her for her AA Membership number, she said that she would have difficulty doing this as she had broken her arm and it was in plaster from the wrist to the shoulder. She was using the phone with her good hand and arm, so if she picked up with her broken one it would be too far away to read. I did wonder how on earth she was going to drive, but decided not to go there.

Anyway, it was at this point in the conversation that she said to me “Yow’m from the Black Country.” Naturally, I had to admit that I was. She then told me that she was homesick and missed the accent, so we decided to continue our conversation in the thickest Black Country dialect imaginable. To an outsider it would have sounded like a foreign language.

At the end of the call she was in tears but said how much she had enjoyed talking to another Yam Yam.

Ray Coburn, AA Customer Experience Specialist