I Got $50 for My Accent

"British/Welsh/Australian Readers Wanted," the classified ad said. "Earn $50 to read simple English text for 1.5 hours for research. Call Ping."

I'm a New Zealander, but Ping accepted my nationality without demurral. We talked like old friends. Our conversation consisted of what I had to do?"read some phrases"?and why?"for a voice recognition software." The more voices recorded, the more the program could recognize.

Two weeks later I presented myself at Ping's office in midtown. I found a couch and a grouchy Irish man, late 20s, who had seen the same ad. Having lived in New York for 12 months without full-time work, Shaun makes his living by construction and semi-scams like this. He was pleased that the WTC site would soon be admitting union labor. Did he have a union card? His voice was his union card.

A cheerful-looking fellow from Hong Kong emerged from one of the rooms. He was enthusiastic: "It's so easy. I was finished in 40 minutes." Wow, I thought. Fifty bucks in 40 minutes; it's almost as lucrative as organ donation.

Ushered to a small, soundproof booth, I found a headset, a sheaf of papers on a lectern before me and a surprise. In fact, Ping's "some phrases" turned out to be 1000 painfully banal sentences. They were the solecisms that the line drawings in English textbooks utter, phrases like, "Could you please take my suitcases?" and "I'd like a cheaper room, but I'd also like a view." There was none of what you normally hear in airports, such as, "Oh shit, my passport!"

A po-faced guy fiddled with my headphone/microphone set. He removed himself to the adjacent room. The CD burner flashed. We were off.

My job was to speak. His job, so far as I could tell, was to say, "Again," if a word or phrase did not produce a suitable pattern on the computer screen before him. He did this about 15 times. He instructed me to pause "long enough, but not too long" between each sentence. I worried about that. Then I gave up.

After 10 minutes I was as bored as he clearly was. And I noticed that he didn't really want genuine speech. New Zealanders tend to mumble. We also drop the first and last syllable off words, and we express vowels through our nostrils. I know this from teaching English in Japan and having students repeat after me, "Weir uz th' seekretery?" He kept saying "Again" when I committed these sins. So I cheated. New Zealanders who have been stateside for long enough tend roll their r's. It's a shortcut. If you don't do this, Americans think you're speaking Russian. I talked a little like a Yank, and the computer didn't seem to mind. "Is this the bus to Boston station?" "I'd like a waiter who can speak Japanese, please." "Can you get me a taxi?" It was like jogging. You start quickly, find a pace, then you tire. You float in and out of daydreams. You try to speed up, then you can't be bothered.

By about 500 sentences, I became anguished. What was the point? No one talks like this, not even computers. At around 800, I lost concentration. My mouth dried. He said "Again" three times. I repeated three times. Finally he said, "The plane." I had stopped seeing what was on the page.

An hour later, after I had finished, he said, "I think about 1000 is as much as most people can do." He had recorded hundreds of people over the last few weeks. Australians were easy to find, ditto Brits, but the Welsh, they were rare. He told me a Welsh group was coming that weekend for a conference. It was the only time I saw him show anything approaching enthusiasm. Then he ejected the CD he had been burning, walked to another office and deposited it on a stack. He shrugged, "See ya." Ping appeared with my check.

To be wanted on an island of eight million people is wonderful, but to be wanted for something as incidental as an accent is joy itself. I phoned Ping back the next week. No, I couldn't repeat my trick. "What's your name?" he asked. I told him. He didn't remember it.