Man Feels Using English Accent Gets Him Better Service

A man who was apparently on a first or second date with a young woman greeted his waiter and ordered drinks with a noticable, but not overly think, English accent. When the waiter departed the young woman asked him what he was doing. The man said that after living with an English roomate for years and watching the way his roomate was treated when they went out, he'd begun using an English himself because the result was almost always better service. He said that in addition to being novel and grabbing attention, the accent seemed to earn him an instant level of respect.
The girl said that she'd struggled with exactly the opposite probelm when she'd left the South and gone to college. She said that in order to have her views taken seriously she'd felt it necessary to downplay her Southern accent. Eventually, she said, she'd learned to drop it all together and she admitted that now when she ventured home should couldn't help feeling that some of her friends sounded kind of dumb.
The man said he wondered why that was? Why did European accents garner respect while Southern ones seemed to do just the opposite?
A Hispanic busyboy working at the table next to them looked over and said, "I don't know but, the further south you come from, the worse it gets."