OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[Starhawk]

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.


My biggest problem here was when I was called be a bloody company alright the scary thing they already knew my zip code and SSN (which later pissed me off to no end).

Anyway so here's how the first conversation went:

"Hello Trevor my name is (not a clue what she said) I would like to talk to you about getting (not a clue wtf she said) since you are now going into college."

(me)
"Um excuse me what do you want?"

(her)
"Yes I represent (babble) and I want to talk to you about (babble).

(me)
"Uh.....look I'm really busy with my school work can you please just tell me What you want?"

(her)
"I would like your zip code again please so we can confirm it at (babble)."

(me)
"Uh two three four five two."

(her)
"Thank you now may I please confirm your social security number?"

(Me)
"I don't think I'd like to give you that unless you can tell me what you want it for."

(her)
"Trevor (since when were we on a first name Basis?) I have already said I represent (god knows who) and we would like to offer you a (blah blah) for your college improvement."

(me)
"Uh look I don't give out my SSN because I don't think you really need it."

(her)
"Fine we'll get back to that later (persistant isn't she?) what college are you in?"

(Me)
"Westwood online."

(her)
"(no clue what she just said here)

(Me)
"Can you say that again please?"

(her)
"I said would you like us to meil (spelt as pronounced) you a (still no idea WTF she said)."

[r]Okay here I was pissed off and irritated because WTF is she saying? so I decided screw it I'm hanging up.[/r]

(me)
"Look I told you fifteen minutes ago I was busy now I have to go back to my tests."

(her)
"This won't take much longer (yeah assuming I can understand you) can you please wait?"

(me)
No look you obviously have my number go ahead and call me back some other...(this is what pissed me off she cut me off here)

(her)
(mumble blather blather) no clue what she even said AFTER she cut me off.

(me)
*click*


She called AGAIN a day later (bugged the holy hell out of me because I still had NO IDEA what she was saying this time around so I hung up even faster).

THE THIRD FREAKING TIME I just said screw it and had my dad pick up the damn phone.

After twenty minutes he realized she was calling me about a College Credit card and that she was outsourced somewhere in India (I'm guessing my dad subtly asked her WTF her accent was)

So yeah I understand how irritating it is to deal with someone who can barely speak English with any comprehensible ability.

I don't want to sound like an "ugly american" but I understand WHY English is the primary trade language of the world (It's relatively easy to learn and you can skid by with knowing less of our language then you can with most).

I mean for instance you can't "skid by" with Spanish because it's got like a hundred and one ways to refer to everything from a spoon to a table and let's not even get into the fact that EVERYTHING has a Gender and if you accidentally use a male instead of female or vice versa what you say will have no meaning whatever.

Indians should be forced to learn english just like any other trade partner if they want to do business with everyday joe American (I don't mean all of India just those directly interacting with me since God knows I don't know Indian).

[Captain Kwok]

*sigh*

You know most Indians can speak and understand English very well (considering most of the education system their is still English-based). Like Geo alluded to earlier, this is mostly an accent issue. The same sort of reason why I have trouble understanding some of my UK work colleagues over the phone.

Sometimes the ignorant comments I see here (and other threads) makes me sad. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img]

[Spoo]

Starhawk said:I don't want to sound like an "ugly american" but I understand WHY English is the primary trade language of the world (It's relatively easy to learn and you can skid by with knowing less of our language then you can with most).

I mean for instance you can't "skid by" with Spanish because it's got like a hundred and one ways to refer to everything from a spoon to a table and let's not even get into the fact that EVERYTHING has a Gender and if you accidentally use a male instead of female or vice versa what you say will have no meaning whatever.

English is the primary trade language of the world because that's what's used in the USA. English is not at all easy to learn. Many of our words are not pronounced the way that they're spelled, i.e. "though", "of", "neighbor", etc.

There are also myriad exceptions in our grammar. Just try listing the rules of grammar. Examples: How do you express a verb in the past tense? Usually you add an -ed: Climb->climbed, but what about run->ran is->was sleep->slept read->read (not the pronounciation changes)? When do you use "too" and when do you use "to"? Also, consider how changing the accent on a word can change it's meaning. "CONtent" vs. "conTENT"

It's funny that you compare English to Spanish. Spanish is a relatively easy language (at least for English speakers) to learn. Consider that the words are almost always spelled exactly like they sound. Accents are always on the second-to-last syllable unless an accent mark is present. Of course, there are irregular verbs etc., but I believe there are significantly less of them than in English. Messing up the gender of nouns/adjectives may cause confusion, but it won't cause complete loss of meaning. Finally, as far as I know, "spoon" is "cuchara" and "table" is "mesa" or "tabla", depending on which definition of "table" you mean. What are the 100 other translations?

[Starhawk]

Well Spoo I suppose in a sense your right however most people do tend to agree that gender designation for myriad objects that are not even alive is a frustrating and difficult aspect to learn.

I agree with that part entirely because I tried to learn Spanish and the gender designation PLUS the different words to represent the SAME object were frustrating as hell.


But I do agree that we should probobly eventually come up with a universal language that is used for trade and international relations because it would seriously simplify things.

Problem is that whole ONE LANGUAGE thing scares the hell out of most people and rightfully so, because a universal language can lead to a universal government and unfortunately you can't be at all sure that would be a good thing.

[Suicide Junkie]

A nice universal language would help as an intermediary for translations too.

How would it lead to one government anyways? That's silly. Better let the Americans, British and Canadians know.

[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.