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.
