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O.T The new "Irony" thread part two.

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BillR

BillR

Born Again Cynic
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Feb 17, 2002
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So for no good reason my Symantec Utilities suddenly “expires” upon reboot tonight. Following all the proper directions I end up with an 800 number to call for assistance.

I figure ok, an 800 number is good, so I call. Not at all to my surprise my call ends up somewhere overseas, as in Bhopal. So I’m still cool thinking ok, nothing to lose.

Guys asks me to read my activation number, he asks me three times.

Finally he tells me HE CAN’T UNDERSTAND ME!

I think that qualifies as “Irony” :rolleyes:
 
You and I disagree on this matter heavily (you being conservative me being liberal), but yes, that is ironic.

Could you understand him, however?

 
Bill....

That was one of the many reasons (one of the better ones) I stoped playing Ultima Online.. used to be a good place to do buisness and they watched out for the gamers

switched companies.. i ended up playing again.. called the 1800VoiceMailFU with someone trying to act "cool"... finally found the random button to push to talk to a human being..

at least i thought so..

took me about 5 calls before the people could understand me...

Politics dont mean jack shit when it comes to things like this... if you are going to pay someone to do a job.. they should be able to do it :rolleyes:


What happened to part one of this? I dont think I ever saw :eek:
 
Yup, it had nothing to do with politics, it was just a funny situation I thought was amusing.

Some just need to lighten up a bit ;)
 
But Bill, this is for the best, have you no idea how many cycles the Symantec stuff steals?!? ;)

The God of Computing has acted for the better! :D

 
Got a call from "Chase" the other day about my account...
Obvious gal from India said her name was "Geena Davis" ...
Just about fell out of my chair laughing before I hung up... ;)
 
Here is the fun trick, is asking where they are located at...

I remeber there was alot of drama threads going on about that in different forums a while back about how they are under orders not to say that they are actually in another country.


And with that whole ultima thing back a few years ago, i remeber asking them to speak to their managers (in hopes they were the english teachers for the pee-ons...) but they spoke even worse english then the others.

Ya know. there are enough dumb people in our country who would be happy to get paid what they are making to sit there and read numbers off a computer screen, at least you can understand the southern draw a little better ;)
 
that's the thing though. there aren't people here willing to do that work; that's what (at first, now it's low cost) prompted US companies to look overseas.

at any rate, let's not turn this into a debate...

 
So stop debating it then :rolleyes: ;)

and its not that there are no people who want to do the job... its the companies that want low overhead... save money on having to pay taxes. etc etc etc

Like who was it AMD or Intel or someone looking at an asian country to start up their next factory, which will save them like 500 million a year...
 
KodiakStar said:
and its not that there are no people who want to do the job... its the companies that want low overhead... save money on having to pay taxes. etc etc etc
Click to expand...
True dat.


Bill, I had a similar experience with Microsoft tech support. I had a couple of long phone conversations with 3 different technical support people (obviously all in India and they didn't even make up American sounding names) and at some point during each call I always got the impression that when they replied to a question with "Yes, Matt" (they always use your name over and over again), they had no idea what I just asked them. They just move on to their next trouble shooting step. "OK, let's try this, Matt..." :)
 
polite = no need to understand the job they are supposed to do.

Makes people feel better talking to them too ;)
 
Haha. I've only had one experience with Indian tech support, that I know of. I had to call SBC to get a password reset on an email account and got this guy with a think Indian accent with the Anglo name of 'Mike'. It took me 20 minutes to take care of a problem that should have taken 3 minutes.

He kept using my name over and over again as well. "Yes Phil this, Yes Phil that..." It was drving me nuts.
 
My girlfriend had problems trying to transfer her minutes from her old tracfone to her newly activated one.... had to go through tech support to do it, and, of course, they have it in india.... 45 minutes later, my girlfriend is crying out of frustration because she can't understand the woman and she keeps repeating the same steps over and over again, along with some long-ass 45+ character activation code or something.... I finally just grabbed the phone from her and asked the woman if I could speak to someone who's first language was english, and she said something about her manager and hung up... I called the number back, and got someone in TX... with a spanish/mexican accent... fun ALL around...


Keep on Folding!! For the [H]orde!!

 
well, i at least have had a good experience with overseas tech support. I had to call Dell a year or so ago about some driver issue (i forget about what, exactly). Guy was Indian, but not much of an accent. I asked him where he was and he said he couldn't tell me :p

at any rate, my problem got fixed fine and fast.



EDIT: thought i would share an article i found.

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xht...g-Here-To-Stay&story_id=24081&category=trends
Since the first report surfaced, along with similar estimates by other consulting firms, the business environment has changed in the United States. The economy has begun to climb out of the onerous recession of the last three and a half years. Also, unemployment appears to trending down following its sharp -- indeed, near unprecedented -- increase during the same time period. In short, outsourcing is unlikely to be the hot political button it was even six months ago.

Ironically, Forrester notes that the outcry prompted in part by its statistics led to a greater awareness of the efficiencies to be gained from outsourcing. "Instead of squelching activity, the increased press and savings have spurred senior executives to ask, 'What is our offshore strategy?'" the report says.
Click to expand...
 
thanks to Gore inventing the internet.. you can find articles to support any idea and slant ;)


still takes money away from US pockets though :rolleyes:

but saves the corps money... bla bla bla..

give me someone who has a us accent anyday :)

or maybe a nice brittish clip
 
it's funny, because Gore never said "i invented the internet", in fact, rather reminiscient of your earlier complex speech, K*, he said something to the effect that he was "instrumental in pushing through legilsation to enable the advance of the internet". or some such :p

and, the net of this is a net gain for us; the majority of Americans are not software consultants/call-center techies. If all of them were to lose their jobs to outsourcing (which hasn't happened), the American economy would (probably, assuming quality of work was just as good) see a short term decline, as the American IT industry crashed, and a long-term gain as dead-weight was cut from the economy.

it's the brutality of globalization.

the only reason people are pissed about it now is because it's White Collar jobs--no one bitches about all our McDonald's toys being made in China/Taiwan or about Indonesians in sweat shops. Those things are also beneficial for America's economy. Kinda hypocritical for us to say "World, you can take all the shitty jobs."

again, the brutality of globalization...

 
I bitch all the time about the cheap crap made elsewhere...

quality for everything sucks anymore...

and to prove a point

"You have to take a total business view of outsourcing technical support," said the customer service manager of a New York ISP who chose to remain anonymous. "And first of all, you have to look at the overall importance of offering quality technical support. When you're talking about capacity and how much you can sell, you have to look not only at technical capacity, but also your customer service capacity. If you're selling within your
technical capacity but over your technical support capacity, you're in for ruin. Outsourcing technical support is certainly an option, but it's not something we would do."

Why not? "Individual customers make up most of our customer service traffic," said the customer service manager. "You'd think, at first, that outsourcing them would be a good idea. But individual customers tend to be our greatest source of referrals. It happens all the time. There will be a guy in his office who mentions our name when his boss asks if anyone knows anything about Internet service -- and boom, that becomes a T1 connection. You have to weigh everything carefully -- the cost giving quality customer service as well as the cost of not giving it."
Click to expand...

http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/management/d935705525.brc



the majority of Americans are not software consultants/call-center techies.
Click to expand...

neither are the people you call for tech support in india.. they just read stuff line by line off a computer screen.. but at least with US tech support you can understand what they are reading/repeating ;)
 
Carnival Forces said:
it's funny, because Gore never said "i invented the internet", in fact, rather reminiscient of your earlier complex speech, K*, he said something to the effect that he was "instrumental in pushing through legilsation to enable the advance of the internet". or some such :p
Click to expand...


Al Gore said:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Click to expand...


http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/g/goreinternet.htm

Oldbenwa
 
KodiakStar said:
neither are the people you call for tech support in india.. they just read stuff line by line off a computer screen.. but at least with US tech support you can understand what they are reading/repeating ;)
Click to expand...

you're right; however, of the big income earners of the middle class, call-center workers in India make up a large large segment. Just in case you didn't know, I am Indian and recently visited my grandparents there. Their own small town, what was once really almost a village (almost), has now been transformed into a booming city. In fact, many kids pay for college by working at a call-center.

It has also provided women with a respectable path to financial, and therefore political/social, freedom. They can work there, even at late hours, and be assured to get to/from their apartment safely etc. It's like the Lowell Textile mills in Massachusettes in the 1800's (1840's or 30's i want to say).

In fact, one of the biggest business Universities in India is now there :eek: Quite a change. The economic effect of killing call-centers in India far outweighs killing them here; imagine killing all the manufacturing jobs in China--yeah the majority of Chinese dont' do those jobs (some are automated in Chinese factories, etc. etc.), but the downturn the Chinese economy as a whole would be drastic.

and really, i have no problem understanding them. at least, i have never had a problem yet--quite possible that there are some who are badly trained etc. But it's not impossible for Indians to speak English; believe me, I can (with no accent).

EDIT: fixed some grammar; probably still a bunch of other errors :p
 
 
Okay this is something ironic, at least as far as most of this thread goes.......

The best call center experience I've ever had was with a Dell rep from India who called himself David, his real name showed up on e-mail as Tayaab.... Every American Dell sales rep I've spoken to was a dick and I stopped using each of them, Tayaab was actually helpful because he wasn't trying to just sell me shit he thought I needed. He had an accent and it wasn't always easy to understand him but I always called him back when I had an order because I respected him. He got transfered to a new dept. so now I'm starting over.......... :eek:

 
I wonder if there is some company policy to have "friendly sounding american names" given over the phone.. hmm.
 
lol, you know it's magic when "Tayaab" becomes "David"

heh, i watched a CNN piece on how they (call-center techies) have to train, they have to practice pronouncing certain letters (r tends to be hard) over and over again with teachers, and then they have to watch sitcoms like "Friends" so they get our idioms.

it's hilarious watching them all recite sentences like "The blue bird flew over the brown fox's nest" or whatever (anything with a bunch of "r"'s in it :p)

it's just ironic that, after years of complaining "everyone should speak our language," that when they start to, we complain about the accents :p

 
KodiakStar said:
I wonder if there is some company policy to have "friendly sounding american names" given over the phone.. hmm.
Click to expand...
yeah there really is. they have to get an Amercianized name, can't tell you their real name, can't tell you where they are, and can only talk about your problem.

it's all in an effort to make them more comprehensible.

 
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