Some customers can be so unreasonable that it’s really hard to understand what is going on inside their minds.

Imagine working at a grocery store in Finland. You know a little English, but your pronunciation is horrible. Would you be surprised if customers like speaking to you in English despite your horrible pronunciation?

In this story, one cashier is in that exact situation, but it gets even crazier because he has another coworker who speaks perfect English.

Let’s see what happens when a customer comes in speaking English.

“No, I don’t understand your English”

Hi there. This happened couple years ago in eastern Finland.

Little backstory first: While I was studying, during summers I worked in my home “town” (well village) in this small grocery store.

This grocery store had also little mail service thingy where you could send and retrieve packets, buy stamps and other post stuff. So when you where manning cash register, you have to worry about mail clients as well.

Usually this wasn’t problem because we had very few customers because, like I said earlier, small village.

There was a regular customer from Sweden.

During one summer we had this regular customer, old and very sweet Swedish lady who was in vacation in my home village (for some reason, there are nothing to see).

Since my Swedish is really bad and she didn’t speak Finnish, we usually small talked in English.

Well my English pronunciation is pretty bad, almost Hydraulic press channel bad, but luckily she understood me, somehow 😀

For some reason she took liking in me and always asked if I was working there, If I wasn’t manning the cash register.

The coworker is even better at speaking English.

On this one faithful day I was pretending to do something near cash register and my co-worker was manning the cash register, when this old lady comes in and asks (in English) 5 cent stamps (or something like that).

One thing you have to know: My co-worker speaks perfect English. Like you wouldn’t believe she is from Finland.

SL= Swedish Lady C= Co-worker Me=Me

SL: Hello there. I like couple 5 cent stamps, please?

Who is misunderstanding whom here?

C: Hi, do you mean these? (Shows sheet of 5 cent stamps)

SL: What? No. I need 5 cent stamps.

C: Uuhh? These are 5 cent stamps. Did you want to buy only one stamp?

SL: No, I need 5 cent stamps, please.

So, does the customer only understand badly pronounced English?

This goes on back and forth for couple minutes, until lady saws me.

SL: Uh, I don’t understand you. Can you ask that young man over there to help.

C: (heavy sigh) Fine. (She waves to me)

Me: Hi ther. Cän I help juu? (very bad English)

SL: Hi, I need 5 cent stamps. I really don’t understand this lady here and she clearly doesn’t know what I what.

This is crazy!

Me: Ok. Let’s sii. We hav this kinda of stamps. (I show her same sheet of 5 cent stamp that my co-worker showed her earlier)

SL: Yes! Finally. Thank you very much young man!

Me: Häppi to help juu!

Co-worker just leaves slowly shaking her head and muttering Finnish swear words.

Wow! That customer interaction was so weird! But one thing I learned from this story is that a lot of people in Finland speak English, even if they don’t pronounce the words very well.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Someone who teaches ESL shares their perspective.

Another person compliments him on his writing.

This person shares their opinion of Finland.

His name is Wandering Oaken.

Sometimes an accent makes it easier to understand.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.