India calling, we have the language, but lack the context.

[featherynscale]

There is nothing one can do to prepare oneself for the day at work that will be quite like spending 30 minutes on the phone to someone in a call center in India, who is doing a survey on technology products and the state of the IT department. This is especially poignantly true when the company one is being interviewed in exhaustive depth about is a non-profit agency which acquires its technology products essentially by raiding other people's dumpsters and, well, frankly, has no IT department. Somehow, these options were not on the call-screen and the caller was confused.

Trying to explain only made it worse. Not to mention that since I've been here, nothing has broken down, so I haven't had any excuse to crawl up into the network, the server, or the PBX, meaning that I don't know much about the specifics of it anyway. I have a recurrent fear that "the server" is actually one of the RMs' desktop PC, but I try not to tell anyone about that.

To end this charming discussion, I had to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining that The Boss would not, in fact, like to recieve further technology questionnaires, and that if the caller felt a driving need to send them anyway, that The Boss would be quite annoyed to be titled "Mr." on the mailing, since she is, in fact, a woman. He finally got round to accepting that, and then says, "Can I direct the mailing to your attention, Mr. _______"? Sure. Why the eff not?

Comments

Mr. ________

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Hey, at least India has no problem with your gender identity issues.

[brandy22kc.livejournal.com]

couple of things to prepare your self 1 talk at the speed of a snail and check often for understanding, with tmobile we gots all kinds of peeps who had lanuge issues, and if you talk really slow then tend to, to so that you can understand them better, the gender thing would tic me though, but that's little issue with india anyway, not to sound bad but its know over there, or you can cone someone else into the call....j/k

Re: Mr. ________

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Mr. just seemed to be this guy's default mode of address... I was wondering if that was a concept that didn't translate well. I don't mind being addressed as Mr., it was just sort of odd.

[wildnsquirrelly.livejournal.com]

Rollin' rollin' rollin,
keep them krishnas rollin',
now my ear drum's swollen,

Rawhiiiiide Heyah!

whip-crack!

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Please to not be rolling the Krishnas. It makes their shiny orange robes all dingy.