STORMCROW'S PROFILE

holy shit I just noticed the cheevos good use of Evanescence lol

I'm aware this is a very global/international website. That said, this topic is being created from a distinctly American perspective. In spite of that, I just want to acknowledge that I know not everyone's experiences are the same all over the world.

ANYWAY:

India is the seventh largest country in the world by area, and the second most populous with a population of 1.324 BILLION-with-a-B people as of the 2016 Census (which obviously means there are millions more Indians born since then).

I just had a relatively wonderful experience with McAfee customer service. I was pleasantly surprised. As it almost always is, my call was transferred to an Indian operator/customer service rep at a phone bank I'd bet my left ovary was in India. In this case, my representative was conscientious and competent and the problem, a simple refund, was easy to unsnarl. This kind of miracle happens about once a year, whereas I find myself talking to customer service and get to experience first hand what it's like to spend an hour or two in hell.

Virtually every single large American corporation outsources its customer service to India or at least the Indian subcontinent. They do this in spite of the fact that Indian non-native English speakers are the people least suited to the task of providing customer service and/or tech support for American English speakers for the following reasons:

• In general, their thick accents make basic communication of anything very difficult.
• In particular, these interactions often involve repeating and confirming long strings of alphanumeric characters. This requires precision that customer service's accent strongly tends to muddy. It's also possible that they even hear the American pronunciation of numbers and letters differently, making it a two way problem. They resort to some bastardized version of the NATO phonetic code word alphabet for this, but an Indian customer service representative saying "R as in Roger" or "P as in Peter" is harder to understand than an English speaker from most everywhere else just saying "R" or "P" so this is a non-solution.
  
• While their English is usually very good, their understanding of American idiomatic English is very poor because they live in a mostly-non-English-speaking country. And most native English speakers rely heavily on their idioms. What this means is that any figure of speech or expression you use frequently in day to day conversation (for instance, I frequently use the phrase "Nah, you're good" to mean "Don't worry about it, it is not a problem, you did not do anything wrong in this instance, please proceed with whatever we were doing") will inevitably sail right over the head of an Indian customer service representative. To communicate effectively, you will need to train yourself to speak in a way that no one speaks.
  
• Finally, if you live on the East coast of the US, the time difference between India is fully 9 hours. If you live further west like I do, the time gap is EVEN bigger. Sure, maybe it's 2:30 in the afternoon for you and you just woke up from a nice afternoon nap and are ready to tackle the challenge of "LET'S GET MY ROUTER WORKING" or whatever, but over there it's 1:57 AM and the person you're talking to is 11 hour shift and just wants you to leave them alone so they can drag themselves home and feed their 16 kids. White American xenophobic racist thinking on my part had me thinking that these Indian phone bank operators are just crabby people by nature, but then I thought about the time difference thing and how fucked that is.

So what you have here is a cohort (fancy anthropological/sociological term for "group of people") that has almost entirely filled a position/role which they are are probably some of the least suited people on Earth to fill.

Why?

Here is what I can come up with:

• There are way too many people in India and far too few jobs.
• Ergo, your average Indian citizen can and will take any job they are offered.
  
• India's enormous overpopulation leads to widespread poverty...
  
• Ergo, Indians will work for very cheap, much cheaper than Americans...
  
• International megacorporations are absolute heartless bastards.

("Americans are unwilling to work customer service phone banks" is not on the list because once or twice a year I do get a non-outsourced native English speaker (they also usually do a shitty job for their own reasons) and there are a few entire companies I can think of that don't outsource to India that I know of.)

Is there anything more to it than the bullet points listed, or am I just being naive? Is there any kind of explanation beyond "American companies are cheap and don't care about their customers so they outsource customer service to India where they can pay Indian phone workers the lowest amount possible because again, they don't care about the customer experience"? Or am I looking for a way to overthink this that really, really, really all there is to it?

In any case, this is a terrible system--poor people being paid exploitative wages to do something they are uniquely unsuited to do in service of customers that their employers don't give half a shit about--and I hate participating in it. And that's from my end, as a relatively privileged American (I am really, really, really fucking poor right now, easily the poorest I've ever been, but I have a feeling that American poverty doesn't stack up to Indian poverty). I'd imagine on the Indian end of the phone lines, it's even worse.

way too many words

man, i do not have time for this,. it's a shame. i wish there were more hours in the day

I play guitar :D What made you want to ask that?

Your username, and also I nominally play bass guitar (although my life has been too hectic to practice for months and months and I'm really not happy about that). I actually have a lot of natural talent on the bass, I think (it is the only musical instrument I've picked up in my life that I've felt like I had any inherent aptitude for, certainly not guitar although not for lack of trying, I was playing more on than off for at least a year and never even managed to get down the GODDAMNED F CHORD but I digress), it's just all being squandered because the day doesn't have enough hours in it for work/chores/pets/gamedev/writing already w/o factoring in the bass. Any free time I'd otherwise spend practicing bass I'm just too wiped out to do anything but play videogames.

Sorry, plz excuse the tangent, carry on discussion of formulas. (I always want the plural of formula to be formulae because it sounds cool, but it isn't.)

that is...amazing. i've never done a speedrun of a survival horror game...kind of must be hard mode w/ the tank controls

that said, could you tell me



asking for a friend obviously