I can empathize, but I still think that was ridiculous

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time trying to get work done in a language that's not my native tongue, I have a lot of empathy for people trying to live and work in that same situation in the US.

And, I know that I am extremely lucky to have inherited my mother's good ear so that I have fewer struggles with my accent than do the vast majority of second (or third, etc.) language learners.

And, I understand that proper nouns, especially people's names and the names of streets (which are often people's names) are somehow especially difficult to catch because there are no contextual clues and you have to get the word exactly right. Plus, native speakers tend to say addresses in a way that is inexplicably difficult to understand if you're not a native speaker.

And, oh *man* do I get how much harder it is to talk on the phone, especially a cell phone, than it is to talk face to face. Words get dropped, little mechanical noises get in the way, voices get altered, and, most importantly, you can't *see* the person you're talking to.

And, I have absolutely felt my share of frustration with my native speaker interlocutors who speak to quickly or too complexly or who just can't seem to figure out what I'm saying. And I've sometimes wondered if the problem is as much their failure to actually listen to me (because they have already decided that I won't be intelligible) as it is my failure to speak well.

But.

I'm not sure that tow truck operator in a large city, for a company that makes the operator communicate directly, via cell phone, while driving, with the customer to arrange the meeting is the ideal job for someone with a strong accent and only decent comprehension.

And,

I can't bring myself to have a lot of empathy for someone who works a car-based job in DC who hasn't figured out that east-west streets go in alphabetical order, starting first with the letters of the alphabet, then with two syllable words, then with three syllable words. Not that DC is an easy city to navigate ... the state name streets that cut the city diagonally make easy navigation impossible ... but that simple alphabetical structure seems like a useful and fairly easy thing to learn. I suppose the one exception to this would be if one's native alphabet used a significantly different system than English ... then the alphabet wouldn't be as second nature and would maybe be harder to use as a guide. So, maybe I should cut the guy some more slack.

But.

I still think maybe a cellular-telephone, street-name-identifying job isn't quite the right niche for him.