What?
So, I'm in a meeting this afternoon. We are talking on speaker phone, which is bad enough, and we are already running late so we are in a hurry. This guy comes on to give a presentation with a whole bunch of complex technical jargon in it. He has a middle eastern accent. Now most of the time I can hang. I have encountered enough people with a similar accent to keep up for the most part. There were, however, some interesting circumstances to this call. He had a bad cold. His nasal passages were blocked. He had a pretty thick accent and was talking quickly. Now, that is bad enough. He was also obviously in a cube farm, so there was plenty of background chatter and knocking about. The one last thing, it almost sounded like there was a craps game taking place on his desk. These loud thunk noises kept interrupting the conversation. All in all, I got the idea and understood the issues. I'm proud of myself actually. That was not a bad trick.