Every day at work I get ten calls from the third world, from places like Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. Those of you who live in those places are probably asking right now, “Who does that Jimbo think he is, calling us third world? When we talk over here about your health care system and your President, we call you third world.”
Of course they probably say it in a different language than that and if we heard them say it, we’d have no idea what they are saying. We’d probably be asking why those Sri Lankans are always chatting about things we can’t understand, and suggesting if they had anything really important to say, they’d say it in English.
Those of you in primarily English-speaking countries are probably saying, “Jimbo must do a large amount of international business.”
To which I’d answer, some, but none so far in Asia.
The company I work for receives a number of magazine subscriptions free of charge and ten times a day someone calls me to ask me if I want to continue my free subscription or begin a free subscription to a magazine to which my company doesn’t currently subscribe. Every time one of them calls, it takes me a few seconds to understand what they are saying, because they are not speaking the same English I do. It is like the outsourcing craze has finally reached saturation.
Sometimes, when you are calling about your credit card bill or at the drive-through at your local fast food place, and the person on the other end of the phone or the speaker has been carefully trained by a major corporation to speak in a fluent American dialect, you don’t immediately realize the third world is on the line. But when it comes down to free magazine subscriptions, anyone who can read a paragraph in English, without extensive training will fit the requirements of the companies that outsource the job to them. Now, it seems, high-quality, high-dollar American telemarketers are being replaced by cheaper foreign labor.
Now, Jimbo likes good old American telemarketers about as much as he likes sitting down on a wet toilet seat, but at least you can understand those bastards when they are on the phone. And, in the old days when you asked them politely to stop calling you by suggesting that if they ever called back you would find them, rip out their heart and stuff it down their throat, you’d get a response like:
“Yeah, right.”
Now, we have a defense against them. On the rare occasions that they call at home, a four-word response will usually get rid of them: Do not call list. And when that doesn’t work, there is still the most powerful defense of all.
“Why are you calling me? I’m on the do not call list.”
“Sir, we’ve done business with you before, so we wanted you to know about special pricing we know you’ll want to take advantage of.”
“Well, if you ever call me back, we’ll never do business again. Do you freakin’ understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
That always seems to work.
Now, it seems that someone has found the wretched of the earth to do the dirty work of the telemarketer. Now your telemarketer has nothing to fear, knowing you will not be able to locate his boiler room in Cambodia so the threat of ripping out his heart will ring empty. If this keeps up, pretty soon the only jobs available in the United States will be managing the outsourcing of American jobs to the third world. You may recall in an earlier blog I complained about Wendy’s using Dave Thomas as their spokesman, years after he died. I said that if Wendy’s hired only the dead, then there would soon not be enough living people with jobs to buy their product.
http://jimboandhisfriends.blogspot.com/2004/11/dead-man-walking.html
Eventually, outsourcing is going to have the same effect. When everyone’s job is outsourced, who will have a job and money to buy the products and keep the economy running?
I guess the living and American workers need someone to speak in their behalf. I guess it might as well be me. After all, I don’t want it to be said that I was yakking on the phone with someone in the third world when everything we hold precious was finally flushed down the toilet.
In Jimbo’s world, next time the third world calls, I’ll tell them no, just like I did last time and the time before.
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