Thaispeak

So when I was in HK last week, I got to work with the Thais again. Now, they're a bunch of nice diligent people, but they're not exactly the best people to talk with in English. By "not exactly the best" I mean 30 minutes with these guys and you know it's going to be a bitch living in their country without knowing Thaispeak.

Anyway, there's this guy named Boy (who I insist is Filipino, because only Filipinos usually use that name/nickame) who works for a project related to mine. One day, he walked up to me and handed out paper that has written on it something like this:

Hello, I am Boy from the team.

Please to meet you.

Are you from the team?

It seems the framework server in UAT is not connecting. Can you please restart it?

Thank you for your kindly assistance.

I thought, wow, it's the first time I've received snail mail at work delivered personally. And then something magical happened.

Boy started saying everything that was written on the paper, word per word.

I held up the paper in front of him and read along with him and I thought, holy shit. This is a major breakthrough.

Subtitles for real life! (complete with mistranslations)

Now if only we can make these subtitles hang below people's heads instead of being printed on paper....