OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[Jack Simth]

Would it directly lead to a world-government? Not really. It would, however, eliminate one of the major roadblocks to a world-government.

[EaX]

"Well considering in this country I can't apply for a lot of jobs unless I speak frickin Spanish (in my own damn country mind you) then if those Indians can't be bothered learning enough English to speak to me they can get a job where they don't have to talk to me."

I'm surprised about that, why do you need to know spanish?

[Randallw]

I occasionally have to deal with Indian call centre staff. Occasionally my Internet is unavailable. Now I'm not one to complain and it usually only lasts a few hours every month or two so I don't worry about it, but I can't see why when I do call them about it I have to call all the way to India. Usually however they call us for some obscure reason or another and I havn't got a clue what they're on about. Last time one of them called up and asked for Mr <my surname>, now that could be me or my father, so I said yes Randall W, and if she wanted my father she didn't even bother to clarify she just hung up.

[Kamog]

Well, I did technical support for a couple of years several years ago and I didn't like it very much. Some of the problems that people reported were strange and I had no idea how to fix them. So I would tell them that I would find out and call them back. The trouble was that there were so many different models and types of products, many of them discontinued, and for some of them, the guys who designed and worked with the product have long since left the company and the documentation they left was very poor, and now there's nobody around who knows much about it. So I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's going on. Some of the products were not very reliable to begin with because they were rushed out to the market without sufficient testing and development. Then the technical support people get the angry phone calls!

[Will]

Well, sort of getting back to the original topic of the post... Those Indians need to just get over themselves. As far as I -- and much of the rest of the population of the world -- am concerned, call center tech support on the scale of "professional prestige" is somewhere between a fast-food restaurant employee and a retail cashier. It's a job mainly for people of the educational advancement around the level of the average American high school student. Which, unfortunately, isn't really that advanced. If they want professional respect, start studying, take entrance exams, and go to school to study in a professional field. Don't try to pass off your work as professional just because you get to sit in an office all day. (As a disclaimer, I have worked the help desk for a company before, and I have done retail cashier briefly. I have thus far been spared from burger flipping.)

Oh, and Spanish is definitely easier than English to learn. Because when you come down to it, English is such a mish-mash of languages from all over the place, and while it is Latin-based, it also has elements of Greek, Germanic/Nordic, Cyrillic, Arabic, and naitive American speech in a lot of the vocabulary. Spanish, you only need to learn a thousand or so verbs with the three main conjugation rules, a few hundred irregular verbs, and a few thousand vocabulary words, and you're set. There's no need for a Spanish-language Thesaurus, but with English it's almost essential. And I remember reading an article on language somewhere before, I believe about Esperanto, that mentioned the size of various languages. It went something like 100,000 total words for a lot of European languages, I think something like 150,000 for Hindi (that's 'Indian' for some of the folks here) or German, and then English... depending on which estimates you take, between 600,000 and over a million. Of course most people only use around 50,000 of those words, and many of them are extremely technical in nature, but there are many words that are mainly regional; probably the easiest to illustrate that with Americans is: 'soda', 'pop', or 'Coke'. Depending on where you are, you use one of those words to mean exactly the same thing.

By the way, thesaurus.reference.com has four noun entries for 'table', and one verb entry.

[Alneyan]

I guess Spanish is needed because of the high number of Spanish people in the US right now, and some of these aren't quite exactly fond of English. You know, cater to your customers, and all that. Fluency in English is the norm here, and a third language is *recommended*.

Most foreigners that learn English in a formal setting have no trouble with "too/to", "their/there", "it's/its", and so on, because our learning is based on writing, and not speaking. I wouldn't say gender-based nouns or tenses are the main problems of French or Spanish: many learners get the articles wrong, but it will not affect comprehension (at least French doesn't have more than a few words with a gender-dependent meaning).

Pronunciation... now that's a funny thing, and possibly the hardest thing to learn. I have a few foreign-born teachers, and though their sentences are perfectly correct, and they have lived in France for a *long* while, some mistakes still sneak by. Comprehension is still perfectly possible, of course. French is a pretty odd language with regards to pronunciation: we have nearly random unvoiced letters that may or may not affect pronunciation, a perfectly regular stress on all our words (word stress is always on the last voiced vowel of the word), all words are stressed in a sentence, but there is a "rhythm", *some* words are linked in speech (the infamous liaison), and we have little love for diphtongs. Of course, other languages have their own pecularities.

[Thermodyne]

Will said:
and then English... depending on which estimates you take, between 600,000 and over a million. {words}

That�s because we have so many lawyers and politicians. I�m sure ole Billy Bob had the non-English speaking world confused with his explanation about the meaning of �I did not have sex with that woman.�

[dogscoff]

Will said:
Well, sort of getting back to the original topic of the post... Those Indians need to just get over themselves. As far as I -- and much of the rest of the population of the world -- am concerned, call center tech support on the scale of "professional prestige" is somewhere between a fast-food restaurant employee and a retail cashier.

You're wrong there. It's not a great job in the Western world, but in India, where the average wage is well under a dollar a day, a call centre job is very well paid and highly covetted.

It's a job mainly for people of the educational advancement around the level of the average American high school student. Which, unfortunately, isn't really that advanced.

Most Indian call centres only employ university graduates. I'll say that again. They only employ university graduates. Sounds crazy I know, but for the wage of one spotty amerian burger-flipper, you can probabaly get two highly qualified and intelligent Indian call centre operatives, and put them in extremely desirable working conditions to boot, so why not? That's why these jobs are going out to those places. And if you want to compare the American education system to the Indian one, I don't think you'll find the Indians coming out too badly.

What's more, call centre operatives almost always speak fluent english already, they've got Britain's shameful colonial history to thank for that, but they often go on accent and culture training courses before starting work in order to iron out the last few barriers to communication. They'll study western TV and culture, and even take on western names. Would you take on an Indian name to get a job?

Now I deal with call centres as much as anyone, and for the most part I have no trouble. I'm not saying there's not a problem with some people that can't be easily understood, but getting pissy with ppl on the other side of the world who are just trying to make a living isn't helping anyone.

As for telesales and so on: Whenever I get one, the second I realise it's a telesales call I calmly but firmly explain that it is my personal policy not to buy anything from any cold call, then politely end the call. They soon stop calling.

The ones that really get on my tits are the ones where you get called up by a [censored] robot that spouts some recorded message into my ear. In these cases I leave the phone off the hook then go do something else, in order to waste as much of the sponging SOB's phone bill as possible.

And yes, English is a ***** to learn as a foreign language. The only reason we native English speakers have so much trouble with foreign languages is that (a) on the whole we are too arrogant to see the point in learning foreign languages (b) we are barely taught English grammar at school which really inhibits foreign language learning, and (c) foreign language teaching is started too late. I was about 9 or ten before I started French lessons at school. However I visited a school in France once where they had 4 year olds learning English. Those kids will be bilingual by the time they are eight, and will have no problems whatsoever moving on to third, fourth, fifth languages.

Finally, although an artificial language like esperanto would save everyone (particularly the Europeans- you don't want to know how much is spent on translation by the EU) a lot of money, they don't work. Mainly because the only reason to learn one is to talk to boring business people about boring business matters. You're never going to read a great book or see a great film or seduce a beautiful woman in an artificial language. Doesn't matter anyway, realtime universal machine voice translation is probably not much more than a decade away. I assure you the Babelfish site is NOT the state if the art.

[Suicide Junkie]

You're never going to read a great book or see a great film or seduce a beautiful woman in an artificial language.

What about Shakespeare in the original Klingon?

[AgentZero]

As someone who recently lost their job to outsourcing (to India, no less), this might sound a bit odd, but I actually have quite a lot of sympathy for the Indians. When I was dealing with the general public, which wasn't long, coz I got my self promoted right quick after a few months of THAT, I can't tell you how many times I answered the phone and had the person on the other line sigh with relief and say 'I can't tell you how good it is to hear someone who speaks English!' Now, I was one of only about 3 native English speakers in an office of about 200, but all the other ESLers had perfect English, it was just accented. But I'd still talk to lots of people on the phone who'd say 'I was just talking to so-and-so and I couldn't understand a word she was saying' and I'd be sitting there thinking, 'Funny, I can understand her perfectly.' But it's a lot trickier to understand someone when it's just a voice in your ear. So if it was that bad when our customers had to deal with European accents, I hate to think of what it's like for the Indians. Hence, my sympathy.

The people who don't get my sympathy are the CEOs and accountants who decided to outsource in the first place. Gob****es. And I'm not just saying that because I lost my job (really!), but because they had an extremely well trained office full of people who were very good at their job (we'd actually have people call us long-distance from the States for help, because, well, we were just that damn good) and they decided to replace us with a group of people who were trained by other people who'd only been trained as teachers two weeks earlier (in contrast, my initial trainer had been with the company 5 years & the guy who trained me after my promotion had been there 25 years), and all this because it'll save a couple million a year. Now, that might sound like quite a bit, but the company in question is a major airline which deals with annual budgets in the billions so a couple million ain't really that much.

As for English being easy to learn, all I can say to that is PFFFFFT! It's an atrociously difficult language to learn. We had a lot of Spanish & South Americans in our office (South Americans came here to stay with the company after their local offices were closed, 2 years later they lose their jobs completely. So much for rewarding employee loyalty), and they were always asking me for help with their English, despite the fact that it was quite good, there were still endless lists of things about the language that confused them. On the other hand, my spoken Spanish actually got pretty good. Just don't ask me to spell any of that crazy stuff.