What is trying to be changed??

[silverwing]

Originally Posted by anonymous

maybe 'mandate' was a poor choice of words, but I have seen newspaper and magazine articles about large companies requiring this, and IBM was used as an example for one of these.

Are you sure it wasn't about Indians modifying their accents so as to be intelligible? Thousands of them have come to this country via the H1B visa program and have become a big presence in the IT and customer service industries (taking American jobs .... but that's a whole 'nuther subject). Americans dealing with them have complained mightily about not being able to understand what they are saying, even that they can't pronounce their names, so some companies have tried to adress that.

[Bethanytedder]

I don't know but I learned better than to call tech support at Dell at night. I actually had a man in tech support in India to tell me to shut up and do what I was told to do. Needless to say he probably got off pretty well because I hung up on him and I couldn't have remember his name if my life had depended on it I was so shocked and furious.

[anonymous]

yes, silverwing, I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing Indians and southerners. The articles were a while back, before outsourcing to India and China became so common.

[silverwing]

Originally Posted by Bethanytedder

I don't know but I learned better than to call tech support at Dell at night. I actually had a man in tech support in India to tell me to shut up and do what I was told to do. Needless to say he probably got off pretty well because I hung up on him and I couldn't have remember his name if my life had depended on it I was so shocked and furious.

Probably an American name shaped by a strong accent.

We trashed our Dell and bought a different brand, purchasing the extended warranty so we could take it back to the store or have one of the Geek Squad fix it. When our Dell cacked, Dh made three calls to three techs, each with an American-sounding name ("Myk", "Bawwb" and "Vill-yum"). Each of them were useless, basically suggesting the same fixes that Dh had already tried, or reading from the same manual we had. When the last tech exasperated him beyond tolerance, insisting that we had a password to our system ("wot ees yor paaswerd?"), Dh hung up with as civil a "thanks for your help" as he could muster. Then he snarled "*F* this!" and told me to get my coat on, we were going to buy a new PC. Now, Dh NEVER says Bad Words - especially THE REALLY BAD WORD - so I silently obeyed. Our HP has hummed merrily along for several years; we'll never buy another Dell.

[anonymous]

The job of tech support at Dell (and most other PC/electronics/software companies) is not to help people. Rather, the job of tech support is to get you off the phone.

Typically they have little knowledge of the product, and read from a very long manual that tells them what to say. I know in some places, tech support staff are evaluated & promoted only by 'average call time' - how long it takes them to get you off the phone. Whether they fix your problem is not relevant.

[Bethanytedder]

Dell told me that their tech support people have 3 weeks training. And I was stupid to believe that their tech support people had a college degree in computer science. Once I came to the realization that I probably knew as much as they did, I quit calling them. But like you said, silverwing, I will never buy another Dell.

[silverwing]

Originally Posted by anonymous

The job of tech support at Dell (and most other PC/electronics/software companies) is not to help people. Rather, the job of tech support is to get you off the phone.

Heh.

Their opinion of Americans is pretty low.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1548816/posts

Meanwhile, an instructor preparing trainees for the job scribbles a golden rule on the blackboard for handling difficult customers: 10=35.

"Remember, a thirty-five-year-old American's brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian's brain ... Americans are dumb, just accept it. I don't want anyone losing their cool during the calls..." the instructor tells a class.

[NYer]

Originally Posted by silverwing

Heh.

Their opinion of Americans is pretty low.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1548816/posts

Yep.

Step foot out of the USA and you will see that we are all seen as **** yankees, they could care less about the petty divisions we have, they despise us as one big group!

[ymbk]

Bingo. You covered most of what I was going to say, so I'll just say Ditto.

The thing I've noticed both there and where I now live is that people move to a ew area claiming that they "love it" and the first thing they try to do is turn it into a copy of what they left. (What do you MEAN thre is now theater group/Starbucks/mag mall/whatever??? We must FIX this. Where I live now, we have a couple who moved from Indiana last year. If i hear "well, in Kokomo we had X" one more time, I may well tell her they road she came in on has a lane going in the oppostie direction. She's otherwise very nice, but she changed her residence without adaptig her midnset. It's rather arrogant to move to a new place and expect everyone else to do things like you're used to elsewhere, IMO. Add to this that people who've lived there for years are getting priced out of their own home towns, it can make for some touchy feelings.

It's not just there, though. It's in any larger town.