Comments

JackW wrote on 7/13/2006, 11:36 AM
As recently as yesterday! Try dropping AT&T as your long distance carrier. The call center is somewhere in India and what passes as English can't be found anywhere in Webster's.

Thanks for sharing, Jay.

Jack
jkrepner wrote on 7/13/2006, 12:47 PM
I laughed at that... but realize that those people in India are taught to talk to Americans the same way that they would speak to a child. The fact that they can speak any form of English and the fact that they can trouble shoot any sort of tech problem speaks volumes to their desire to better themselves.

It's the machine of capitalism that causes this. People want to load their gigantic SUV's to the brim with the cheapest garbage they can possibly get their fat hands on at Wal-Mart. The companies squeeze the bottom line to drop prices and move what they can to cheaper labor markets and fat dumb Americans are left talking to people in developing countries for support and then turn around and have the gall to post messages about how dumb and or illiterate those people are.

Could you imagine trying to speak one of the various languages in their world and trouble shoot technical problems over the phone? It's not like they have tons of choices. Right?

Now, with that said, the real problem lies wit the greedy companies (Verizon comes to mind) that farm out work to those countries to save money when they already makes billions. Of course those rich crooks (flush with big company money) that run this country don't put up much of fight to keep jobs here. Do they?

Sorry to rant.
Steve Mann wrote on 7/13/2006, 2:40 PM
"Now, with that said, the real problem lies wit the greedy companies (Verizon comes to mind) that farm out work to those countries to save money when they already makes billions."

AT&T bought Verizon a few weeks ago.
Coursedesign wrote on 7/13/2006, 4:06 PM
The fact that they can speak any form of English...

English is one of the two national languages in India (the other one is Hindi).

English is of course not spoken by the poorest people who live a whole family on a 10x10 ft. plot of land with a ditch all around for calls of nature, next to the train tracks from Mumbai to Pune, but it is truly a native language for all educated people in India.
dand9959 wrote on 7/13/2006, 6:13 PM
Well, I thought it was funny.
birdcat wrote on 7/14/2006, 6:22 AM
I thought it was hilarious - More from the fact that I have spoken to that person at least four times in dealing with all sorts of technical issues.

This is not the place (my belief) to get into the ills or benefits of offshoring - There are good arguments on both sides of that issue. But I wlll say that if a company is employing folks (anywhere) to deal with an American English speaking public, the person the public speaks to should be able to converse without the problems exemplified by that clip.

Just MHO
farss wrote on 7/14/2006, 6:42 AM
The ones that really tickle me are the cold calls from India using VoIP, at best you could barely understand them BEFORE the VoIP mangles, garbles, distorts and drops half the packets.
And what are they trying to sell me?
A cheaper phone service for my business, yeah right!

Bob.
dibbkd wrote on 7/15/2006, 5:14 AM
This was particularly funny to me because just yesterday I got a call back from a helpdesk person for the company I work for.

He was from CSC India.

The only thing I could make out from the call was blah blah blah WAN Upgrade blah blah blah. I felt like I was in Gary Larson's cartoon titled "what the dog hears" or something like that.

The phone number the guy left me didn't work either.