…And Bells on Her Toes

I work for an American company.  Strike that.  I work for a company whose global headquarters are in France and our “local” headquarters are in Virginia.  I’m not sure if our Pickering office is a satellite or a regional division.  It seems to depend who you talk to at any given point.  I’ve been here 3.5 years and I’m still trying to figure it out.

Our current VP is American, as was the VP before him.  He has this charming southern accent and all the wonderful southern gentleman manners to go with it.  My office is very eclectic.  There are very few born and bred Canadians here, most people have immigrated here from places far away.  They have come to Canada to have a better life for themselves and their families.  Truly we are a melting pot.  Considering the industry I work for, we better not have any meltdowns, but I digress.

I guess it’s a cultural thing.  Yesterday I overheard my VP talking to one of the engineers who was born in another country.  He asked the VP where he was from and the VP said “Virginia”.  I missed part of the conversation, but I heard the VP say “West Virginia is a different State…”.

I guess U.S. geography is as much of a mystery to us as Canada is to them.

I had someone from our Virginia office two summers ago ask me about the weather up here.  I said it was really hot, we were in the middle of a heat wave.  She said it must be terrible with the heat not to have air conditioning …

Not missing a beat, I replied that not only have we had air conditioning in Canada for a couple of years, but we recently invented ice.  For some reason, one of the myths along with us living in igloos is that it’s not hot enough to warrant air conditioning, eh.

And we don’t say ‘eh’, eh?

I’ve been told by some Americans that my “accent” makes me sound like I’m from Ohio.  I tell them that I’m a “Tra-na” girl (read: Toronto), and I don’t have an accent.  I also like to enter my “foy-yay”, go sit on my “couch” and drink “pop”.  My American counterparts enter their “foy-yer”, sit on the “sofa” and drink “soda”.

But then again, their President can’t pronounce Nuclear.