Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Gender fluidity, free roaming and 1000 anytime minutes--such a deal!


I heard this wonderful story from Magid Jhos Singer, who i met a couple weeks ago when i was back at brown to give a lecture. Jhos is trasgendered, which i bring up here only as it is directly relevant to the story Jhos told me. I will leave it in the first-person, confusing as that may be.
I once went to change my cell phone service at a Sprint store, it was about 6 months after
starting on Testosterone so the masculinization was happening but it was subtle.... Anyway, I go in and the guy who was helping me cued male, used all male pronouns and 'thank you sir' etc..... He was new to the job and he needed some help accessing something with my account,
so he calls one of his colleagues over help out--now this other guy looked at me and he cued female, so the conversation went something like this:

guy 1-sir, how many minutes do you want?
guy 2-'she had 750 minutes on her last plan."
guy 1-"well he said he was interested in more minutes, is that right
sir."
me, "I think so, could you show me the different plans?"
guy 2 "ma'am I think these are the 2 best plans for you (turns to the
other guy) does she want a new phone?"
guy 1 "Sir, do you need a new phone?"
Me "Ideally yes."
guy 2 "lets see, she had the sanyo 1900, we could upgrade that for her
to the motorola 388d"
guy 1" (to the other guy) he said he wants a speakerphone, Sir, would
you like internet access on your phone? "
Me "no thanks"
guy 2 "OK ma'am, we have a Nokia that might work for you. (to the other
guy) give her the Nokia 71-hq, it should be what she needs."
guy 1 "He said he wanted a flip phone"....................

It was totally hilarious, neither one of them wavered a bit, neither
one corrected the other or pushed their perception, it was this
remarkable moment of each of them having their own experience and not
comparing or conforming their language to reflect the other guys
perception. Interchangable pronouns, how cool is that?!?!? Gender
fluidity, free roaming and 1000 anytime minutes--such a deal!!!!

1 Comments:

At 4/04/2006 , Anonymous Anonymous said...

that's awesome...it's a little incredible that the two cell phone guys didn't notice they were contradicting each other's reality..

 

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