Reading Dialects

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I debated whether I should post this under Reading or Writing - I decided on Reading because my question is more about how people react when reading, though there is a little why do writers do this in it too. Okay, when a character in a book has an accent of some sort, often the author will write their words with deliberate misspellings to try to imitate the sound of the accent. For example, if a character is described as cockney they might say something like, "We 'ave lots o' time, gov'nur... " My question is, when you're reading and you come across this and it continues on for several paragraphs, does it drive you INSANE like it does me? One or two lines is one thing, but when an important character "talks" like this for quite a stretch of the story, it's maddening. And sometimes if the accent is really extreme and the author goes wild with it, it can be difficult to understand what the character is saying. I'm in the middle of reading a short story that contains this kind of thing and I got to askin myself, "WHY do authors even do this, can't they just say the person has an accent then spell their words normally, and let us use our imaginations to fill in what they sound like?" So what does everybody think, does this bother you? Do you think it's necessary for writers to do this or not? And if you are a writer, do you do this, and why?