How to Learn French in a Hurry
From Mrs. PQ
The other day I saw a book entitled "How to Learn French in a Hurry", and after checking my credit cards to make sure none of the quills were covertly planning to wing their way to France, chucking their education to follow their muse, I began to ponder how one might "learn french in a hurry". Teaching a teenager to drive your new car with manual transmission immediately came to mind. There was a whole lot of "french" *that evening, coupled with the smell of a grinding clutch. Opening a report card to discover the kid was serious when she decided to "just give up on school" spring semester. As I confiscated her iPhone some sort of language accompanied the fire blazing from my eardrums, that, while indiscernible, was mutually understood.
One other way to learn french in a hurry is to go to an e-commerce site, find a product you love, and then become foiled by technology, unable to make a purchase. I received an email this week from our crack customer service staff regarding a gentleman in Great Britain who had been trying for two weeks to buy one of our lovely new Cartella Linen cases for Macbook Air. There was so much technical jargon in his letter that it made my eyeballs bleed. I would have been speaking french at that point, but he was using the lovely Queen's english. The very fact that he persevered for two weeks to own one of our products was enough for me to jump into the conversation and reward his patience with a Cartella, gratis. I'll have to sneak my way into the shipping area to send it off to him, as Mr. PQ keeps me largely relegated to my office, (that I affectionately call The Dungeon), where I can do the least damage to servers/websites etc. But we have one more satisfied customer, joy, and the new web site is coming along swimmingly, including the debugs for international orders and so continues another day in the Pad and Quill universe.
*For our international readers: it is an American custom to use the phrase "excuse my french" whenever one impolitely drops a course or inappropriate word into conversation. I'll be researching and reporting back on that custom for my next blog post.
Kari
