Answering the phone WAS: Licensing snafu

[Fairlight]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:33:56PM -0400, Walter Vaughan, the prominent
pundit, witicized:
> I get this cold call from PCMall with this person who is now my account
> manager.  Fine, I'll listen for a few minutes. The only problem is that I
> can't understand a word he's saying. People in Bangalore India need jobs
> too. But golly gee wiz, I ask him to repeat things several times, and
> It's just making me crazy that now I am feeling xenophobic. "Can't they
> find some farmers wife in North Dakota to make these calls?", is all I am
> thinking. Do we have to shift all the jobs to India?

Ya know...couple things...

1) Try dealing with the situation when -you- call the card issuer to
straighten out a mess the bank has made that you have to beg them to clean
up, and have to cut through the accent with a diamond-edged knife.  You at
least have the luxury of ignoring the account manager.

2) A lot of those people you think in India--aren't.  In the Serif forums
and a few other places, I've seen references to, for instance, tech support
in Nottingham sounding like it's in India, but they're actually right there
in Nottingham, England.

C'mon, Walter...my white niece here in Kentucky has ebonics mastered, much
to my dismay.  You expect people that come to "western" countries (I'm
counting the UK as western) to be able to drop their legitimate foreign
accents--or even have any incentive to?  I mean, I was at Wal*Mart last
week and saw a microwave oven box labelled -purely- in Spanish.  There were
two sets of boxes...identical ovens, one set of boxes in English, the other
in Spanish.  No dual labelling...one or the other.

After seeing things like that, it -is- enough to make me think that the
"National Language" idea might not be quite so bad after all.

mark->
-- 
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