Answering the phone WAS: Licensing snafu

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>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.

The ones from India or Pakistan might be easier for a U.S.  English speaker
to understand than someone from England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.  I
think it was Winston Churchill who said the U.S. and Britain are two
peoples, separated by a common language.

>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.

When I moved from Connecticut to Maryland in the late '50s, I had to learn
a new dialect to understand many of the locals.

My sister has been married to an Iranian since 1966, and spent 10 years in
Tehran.  She is totally fluent in Farsi, and I've heard many of her Iranian
friends say her accent is better than their own.  Sally's main motivation
was that she didn't want her children speaking a language that she didn't
understand, but it certainly made her life easier (and provided some
moments of high amusement when the locals didn't expect the American Broad
to understand what they were saying -- more so here in the U.S. with people
speaking Farsi).

>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.

I've often discussed this with ``spanish'' friends from the U.S.
Southwest, and they've always said that bilingual education is a losing
proposition, that it's critical to be able to speak English fluently to get
along in the main stream society.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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The pinnacle of open systems is: when moving from vendor to vendor, the
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