To a call centre employee:
Canadian call centres are all in Quebec or the Atlantic provinces (the accents have it), while American ones are all in India. Okay, it’s cheaper to have them there. (The supervisors and stuff seem to also be in the Atlantic provinces.) And it’s cheaper for a Canadian company to have both languages in one place as opposed to halfway across the world from each other, I guess.
A few things I haven’t understood, though.
- If *you’re* Canadian and *I’m* Canadian, even though we’re talking about an American computer, can we call the letter zed? Especially when I hear you say that and then correct yourself to zee. (Also: which letter is normally learned in India upon learning English?)
- If you’re in India, we all know that your name isn’t really George Foster. Is there some reason you’ve been given new names by the company? Indian names aren’t *that* hard. Note that I can often tell who is new based on how much they stumble over their name.
- Since you are given a new, American name, do you get to pick it yourself (out of some list, perhaps, so you don’t get the recent-immigrant issue of choosing names like Dolores and Edna[1]) or are they assigned? How are the names made up, anyways? Is there a list of n first names and m last names, and we just multiply out?
[1] Apparently Jews outside of Israel do the same kind of thing, choosing dead grandmother names for their kids (like my name, which one Hebrew teacher I had changed on me. Though since my name means “good mother”, I wasn’t too annoyed). I assume this is true of most people moving somewhere and having to choose a new name before they get an idea of the culture, so basing it on what sounds nice in their first language.
November 26th, 2004 at 8:01 pm
It would be better if you started a campaign to rid the world of zee. I’ll help. Every time I say “ess zee” the other person hears “ess see.” (Oh, it’s even worse than that.)
November 26th, 2004 at 9:33 pm
Sorry about the business question, wolfangel, but by any chance are you using Typecast or any other blogging software? Or are you using resourses provided to you from your host? I’m asking because I’d like to start blogging myself, and very much admire your site–
November 26th, 2004 at 9:49 pm
1) can we call the letter zed?
No. He has to fake an American accent because you are a Canadian, and Canadians feel Americans are more authorative. In fact, if you say zed he will probably have to pretend he doesn’t understand you.
B) Is there some reason you’ve been given new names
Yes. It’s an attempt to fool the customers into thinking they can understand English.
III) How are the names made up, anyways?
I don’t know. If they were to ask me for suggestions, though, I would suggest they pick names they know how to pronounce.
November 26th, 2004 at 10:36 pm
Becky (if journals can call you Ms Hirta . . . plus, easier to type, though not shorter once we add in a 17 word long explanation): I would love to. We used to have people at the BORDER CROSSING in Vermont who, when we’d give the license plate go “So your plate is ‘jay zee ee dee aitch . . . ‘” — eventually we gave up. But you’d think if you live on the border you’d learn to understand that Zed is also a letter name. How often do you say ess zee, though?
Eleatic, I’d be happy to discuss the choices I’ve made about blogging with you — you could email me at wolfangel - at - gmail - dot - com. I used Typepad and found it incredibly limiting and disliked it. I’ve heard they’ve changed since, but I don’t know. I don’t like the commenting function on blogger, though there are hacks around it. I’m using Wordpress, which is open source software. My host has something that will automatically install it for me (or my old one did, I’m not so sure about this new one). Usually they will do it for you if there’s not a program. It depends what you’re looking for and why.
November 26th, 2004 at 11:37 pm
Not so much now that I can buy things over the internet instead of over the phone. Anyone who has ever lived in a hard-to-spell city probably has a similar gripe.
November 27th, 2004 at 1:44 am
I never ever call customer service numbers. I cannot bear it. Often I cannot understand the accents (for whatever reason I have a very hard time with Indian-accented English — and I do try. Was deadly for me in school since some TAs and later in grad school classmates were from there). Grrr.
November 27th, 2004 at 12:28 pm
Funny, I find that of accents, Indian is the easiest (after French, but that’s unfair, I think). Understanding people with accents is a fascinating topic. For instance, although I had no trouble understanding Russian-accented Hebrew, I have a lot of trouble with Spanish or German-accented.
Getting rid of your accent is about the hardest thing to do — I have spent *years* trying to get French t/p/k, but I still have the English ones. My father, who spends more time speaking French than English, still has a heavy English accent. My grandparents moved to England close to 70 years ago — and they still have German accents.
So I guess my point is that I’m not trying to insult people by commenting on accents, I just think that comprehension of second language learners (and in your second language) is a neat topic.
My city is not so much hard to spell as my last name. And I always forget what word stands for f in the spell-out code (foxtrot, which I can remember since I don’t need it at the moemnt), and so I get stuck trying to say “effffff, not esssss”, and thinking up words like phone.
The other fun is that my name has both a G and a J in it, and in French, the letter G is pronounced ‘jay’ and the letter J is pronounced ‘gee’ (though the j sound is different), and you go round and round trying to figure out which ‘gee’ you’re talking about when you’re spelling something.
I hate my name.
November 27th, 2004 at 4:21 pm
I have an embarassingly hard time understanding accented English.
My accent in French is so bad as to be incomprehensible to all but the most sharp-eared and patient French-teachers. (Yes, I took the absolute minimum amount of French necessary to graduate from both HS and College. Fortunately it doesn’t take much French to read math papers because all the words are cognates.)
My accent in Polish is supposedly not bad. Not that this is useful because I can not speak Polish — rather I know a small handful of words and phrases picked up from my grandparents and from a few days in Warsaw and Krakow in 1999. Most importantly: kawa z mlekiem y cukier (coffee with milk and sugar). And: sernik (cheesecake).
Oh, and that’s a hint as to why I so often need to say “ess zee see zee” (Yes, I was being coy before, but it’s not like it’s that big a secret.). No one hears that string correctly. The replacement of zee with zed would be so wonderful.
November 27th, 2004 at 8:52 pm
A number of the call centres have moved westward into Ontario. My husband now works for one such beast. He was bemused to get a call out of the states from a Frenchwoman who was thrilled and surprised to get her technical support in French.
November 27th, 2004 at 9:30 pm
A friend of mine converses with his mother-in-law in Polish and English. She speaks Polish, he speaks English, they understand each other. It avoids the problem….
November 28th, 2004 at 9:34 am
(I won’t tell my “someone mistakenly thought I spoke Polish” story. This time.)
When I called support for my cable modem in the (relatively) early morning, once, I got tech support in Newfoundland. I caught bits of the accent, so I asked. I think for a lot of support lines, when you call makes more difference than where you call from, in terms of where you’re connected.
There’s a strong regional accent where I grew up, and people often are surprised to learn that I grew up there because I’ve shed most of the accent. It comes back when I talk to people who have it, though. In addition, I picked up some sentence-syntax quirks from my time in Pennsylvania-German territory.
November 28th, 2004 at 11:32 pm
THis is rich!
November 29th, 2004 at 1:18 pm
In Ontario? I did not know that (I’ve never hit anyone in Ontario, or, if I have, they recently moved there from further east). I’ve also found that the higher level of person you need to speak to, the more likely you are to reach someone in North America.
I suppose the sz should have clued me in, but it didn’t. And no one has ever thought I spoke Polish. (Many people have thought I didn’t speak English.)
Cougar: that’s a pretty normal mode of conversation for two fluent people who have different first languages.