At coffee in Cihangir today we sat next to an American on the phone and, of course, eavesdropped with great interest. He was talking to some sort of helpline in the US, to find out if he could get his first dose of the vaccine here in Turkey and then the second dose in the US as he was having to return to his home country in between. This was clearly beyond the comprehension of the person on the other side who either did not know what he was referring to when he called it the Bio N Tech vaccine (rather than Pfizer), or simply could not comprehend an American not in America. The American got more and more enraged, but in a very American sense, getting tighter and tighter, repeating the word ‘ma’am’ like a crack of a whip, voice growing slower and more measured even as his anger grew, words spacing out and articulated with the whole mouth, and finally he exploded ‘Jesus Mary woman, are you not listening to what I am telling you?’
I could rather sympathise with him, as it did seem as though he had a fairly clear and simple question to which the woman just did not answer, or admit that she could not answer it, and instead answered another question. But there is something very specific about anger in America, especially when directed at customer service types, the extreme tightness around it. It reminded me and the GF very much of another angry American, a woman in a Wellington bus whose tight anger at not receiving a service she expected came up against a particularly relaxed, polite and completely uninterested Kiwi.