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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.