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Friday 18 November 2005, 07:02
American bad manners : And this surprises them?
STAFF AT Indian call centres dealing with Americans are getting more angry at some callers' rude, backward, stupid and bigoted comments.
A collective for Indian workers, formed by Vinod Shetty, a Bombay lawyer, said that most of the Americans seemed to have chip on their shoulder about outsourcing and vented their insecurities on call centre staff.
Shetty, who was interviewed by the San Francisco Gate newspaper, said that a lot of trauma is caused by rude Americans.
The Indians have recently made a sitcom about working in a call centre which unleashed a storm in the ancient country. Mostly because it was based on true cases and depict Westerners as arrogant, immoral and comically rude.
One of the episodes recreates a real-life exchange that occurred in January between an American and an Indian agent. The Philadelphia radio show "Star and Buc Wild," host Troi Terrain phoned an Indian call centre pretending to order hair beads for his daughter.
"Listen to me, you dirty rat eater," Terrain growled. "I'll come out there and choke the ####### out of you. You're a filthy rat eater. I'm calling about my American six year old white girl. How dare you outsource my call?"
Now Americans thought that a huge joke, because they liked Friends, but when the Indians are dealing with this sort of stuff every day it starts to be too close to reality to be funny.
For example, the Gate tells of a call from a woman in Texas recently to a bloke in an Indian call centre. She started by saying that thanks to outsourcing: "You are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving."
She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to offer advice that promptly fixed her problem – turn her computer off and reboot.
More here. µ