Comment by Planktonne
2 hours ago
It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents. It requires only a little consideration and acclimatisation.
It's not inherently racist, just very lazy, but it can quickly lead to racism.
You say it requires a little acclimatisation, but the caller may well just not know anyone with that specific accent/have never had the chance to acclimatise to it other than this phone call, there's an awful lot of accents in the world.
Additionally I find even though I can understand an Indian accent for example quite well in person, I really struggle with it over the phone due to the compression causing quite poor sound quality and lack of facial expressions to be able to read (which I would be using in person to help me understand a strong unfamiliar accent), whereas when accent is more familiar to me, the poor audio quality and lack of body language isn't nearly as much of an issue, presumably as I just have way way more exposure to the accent so can fill in gaps better.