Tenuous Line Between Misunderstanding, Heartache

EMORY, Va. – It’s a perfect illustration of how tenuous our peaceful coexistence is. Two strong, capable women – divided by an accent and the imperfect audio clarity sometimes produced by telephones – can bear witness to the same incident and see polar opposites.

Innocent misunderstandings can develop into hurt feelings.

Twange Kasoma just wanted garbage service. It took three phone calls, a little ruse from a colleague/imposter and a lot of heartache and anger. As it turns out, the customer service representative she firmly believed had discriminated against her based on race is, in fact, also black.

Kasoma, 32, is a Ph.D. journalism professor at Emory & Henry College. She spent the first 25 years of her life in Africa, including her native Zambia and then Ghana. She immigrated to the United States in 2002 for graduate work and has been here since. She has an accent, and it’s delightful.

On Feb. 17, she called a company she knew serviced Emory & Henry: Allied Waste Tri-Cities, a Church Hill, Tenn., branch of Phoenix-based Republic Services Inc.

Kasoma moved into a home owned by the college near the campus. But the customer service representative who fielded her call immediately inquired about her accent and then “brushed me off, saying they did not service my area despite my telling her that others around me said they received service,” Kasoma said last week.

Kasoma clicked on the company’s Web site and searched its service area. She found Meadowview-Emory listed and then called back. Again, she said, the same representative said Allied Waste didn’t go there.

Troubled and suspicious, Kasoma told a math professor about the experience. So he called the company, got the same customer service representative, and gave her Kasoma’s Arbor Street address. Service was established. And then he handed the phone to Kasoma, who got the account listed in her name.

“I was extremely mad – really, really mad,” Kasoma said. “I didn’t expect to be treated that way. I was hurt.”

A corporate spokesman for Republic Services blamed the incident on a misunderstanding, and he appears to be right.

Will Flower, the firm’s executive vice president of communications, immediately launched an investigation after fielding my e-mail last week about this incident. He acknowledged that the company rep erred by not locating the address in the service area. But he noted that this temporary employee had an exemplary record in the firm’s Nashville call center.

“Republic Services does not discriminate,” Flower said in an e-mail Wednesday. “Everyone produces trash and we want to take care of their waste regardless of sex, race, color or creed. Ours is not a glamorous job but it is one that we take very seriously.”

Heightening Kasoma’s suspicions is the fact that the customer service rep in question recently was let go under a company policy that does not allow temps to work longer than six months.

“ ... [I]n accordance with Company Policy, we asked the temporary worker service firm to provide an alternate candidate,” Flower e-mailed. “This is standard operating procedure. Again, we saw nothing in the six months that would indicate a problem.”

Flower’s greatest concern was the incorrect assertion that Republic did not service Kasoma’s Arbor Street address. “I lost revenue on that,” he said.

Only the customer service representative knows what was in her heart and mind at the time she fielded Kasoma’s calls. But after speaking with Felicia Frame by telephone Friday, it’s easy to conclude this incident was an innocent misunderstanding.

Rather than inquiring about Kasoma’s accent, Frame said she was having trouble understanding Kasoma and asked her to spell out the name of her street. Since no other customers lived on that street, Frame said she couldn’t find the street in the service area.

“I honestly was not understanding what she was saying,” Frame said. “It wasn’t anything like that [discrimination].”

The hurt in Kasoma’s eyes is real, however. And perhaps all of us can learn a lesson here: We all need to communicate more and better.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jtoddbhc.