Posted on 01/15/2006 7:44:31 AM PST by SmithL
Exactly. Give me a coal mine anyday over having to deal with those obnoxious jerks on the help desk lines. It is truly a job from hell. India can have those jobs.
Sorry! But it can be a hazzle to speak with someone out of the country. We buy a product or service in the U.S. and find we have no direct contact with the provider. I spent over 2 weeks trying to get a U.S. contact number to get warranty service on my HP monitor that burned up on me. The contacts in India said that they couldn't give me a U.S. number.
They aparently were correct. I finally was able to speak with someone in Canada. He finally was able to help me get a replacement monitor. Surprisingly the power switch on the replacement was defective and I had to send it back for another one. Great gobs of joy!!!
It appears that the vast majoirty of thse jobs are outsourced to other countries since no one in the U.S. will work for the wages they provide. I read somewhere that our taxpayer information is also being reviewed in India. that should make most of us happy to know that information is no longer protected or private.
Dontcha imagine our Social Security numbers are in good hands?
Same here. I started with Peter Norton's DOS unerase utility and finally gave up on Symantec last year. Too many headaches.
You can download a year's free trial of CA Antivirus here:
My success rate with Indian tech support is about one in five. Every fifth call I get my question answered. When I hear an Indian accent, my first inclination is now to avoid the imminent headache by hanging up.
Yeah, and would still be practicing suttee and thugee if it weren't for the Brits.
"Jeff" and "Cindy" are (ahem) NOT Shakespear.
Yes, but it's no different between telephone support here in the US and when it's been outsourced.
Unless you have either a special support contract, or are warranty authorized to work on a system, when you call a help desk (and you happen to know something about computers), be prepared to speak to at least 3 people who know less about the problem than you do. In the past, before computers became commodity items, like tvs and toasters, when you called a tech support line, you'd get someone who could help you, sometimes even one of the engineers who designed the hardware or software. Sadly, those days are gone forever.
For instance, when I work on a client's computer who qualifies for Dell Premiere Service (which I believe is 100 or more PCs or 5 or more servers) then when I need to speak to someone at Dell, I get straight through to someone who can help me. On the other hand, when a client needs me to come out and run the diags on the Dell they've bought (and I've explained to them why I have to bill them, even though the system is still under warranty) because the Dell tech on the phone wants them to do things like open up the system and reseat the boards and cables: I even had one tell a client that they needed to reseat the processor. Thankfully, they didn't try that one!
When I have to help them, I wind up talking to a script monkey who's reading from a book of procedures. Invariably, I will have already done everything they want to have done, but they'll insist that I go through all the steps with them, wasting the time of my client and myself. When all I really needed them to do was to have them dispatch a part and tech to install it! (Dell does NOT include diagnosing the problem under their warranty, so the end user has to work with the tech on the telephone to make sure that they diagnose the problem correctly, before Dell will dispatch a part and a tech who will install it at no charge.
I had a client who wound up spending $450 in order to get a free, warranty replacement 80GB hard drive for their Dell server that they could have bought new for less than $100, and another $150 for me to restore all of their data.
Mark
Oh, please don't get me started on the sort of technical (non) support you get a Symantec!
Mark
Ugh! Stay away from CA. It's caused so many headaches for my clients, but then they were running networks: The one thing they had in common was that it caused all sorts of problems with network access speed, as well as losing connections to the SQL server.
Those same clients had no problems with AVG and Trend Micro. I've also heard very good things about Kasperski.
Mark
Are you honestly trying to compare blacks in any way America to Dalits in India?!
Why not? Dalits in India are recipients of state largesse like affirmative action and preferential treatment (like Blacks here). There are laws against discrimination in both countries too. One exception though - Dalits have risen to the HIGHEST political positions in India.
As I repeated earlier, America has a record of discrimination too (like India and ALL other societies). I just find it hypocritical that some India-hating Americans are so willing to point out faults in other cultures while conveniently ignoring their own.
Thanks for the info.
In the past two months I have loaded CA on seven computers, all networked (but no SQL server), with no apparent problems with network speed or lost connections. Still, I'll keep what you say in mind.
Wow! You mean sort of like Condi Rice and Colin Powell?
This thread is about terrible, outsourced tech support, where problems don't get solved and accents are horrendous.
Are you saying these people are liars?
Why don't you start a thread about terrible in-country tech support and we'll commiserate with you.
The USA is the gentlest, kindest, most self-less superpower there has ever been. Imagine -- even NOW, the USA's military can take on the rest of the world, combined, and win. Economically, the USA's GDP is $10 Trillion. The next after that is Japan with $3 Trillion and the USA's economy is still growing at 3+%. It's good to have self-doubts, makes a nation great instead of a bully, however, you can take it to another level by being too apologetic and that's Michael Moore's case.
Whenever I get substandard tech support from overseas, I just say "Sari, wrong number." That way we don't waste time trying to curry favor with one another.
Do you have any examples of people like KR Narayan (assuming you have even heard of him; psst...he was President of India).
Another thing - don't put words into my mouth...I dn't call people liars on this thread. On the other hand, I was certainly pointing out to some people that discrimination is not a purely Indian phenomenon and enough exists in American history too.
Looks like you can't debate my points and have to resort to fiction to make your case. Why don't you start you own thread to indulge in your bizarre fantasies?
I have no beef with you either. No offense meant and none taken. That said, one must really go beyond news stories to understand the true picture in any country. The image of America is totally different from what is shown on TV around Asia. Similarly, Dalits do not live under defacto slavery conditions.....they are pampered to the extent that most of them (in federal or state service) get automatic admission, promotions, and raises)as opposed to non-Dalits in the workplace). The reality is quite different from the sensational exceptions that make their way into our local TV markets.
lol!
"Maybe someone can go into a third-world country and run a special school for call center people that would start them from ground zero in teaching unaccented English."
That is already happening - courses in English pronunciation. It won't be too long before the Indians you speak with will sound like they are from Indiana. Remember that there have far, far more applicants for those positions than there are positions. Once even a small minority learns to pronounce English better, that small minority will be disproportionately represented in the ranks of the call center employees.
"Wow! You mean sort of like Condi Rice and Colin Powell? "
Err....no not really. Its more like this:
#1 Dalits are the majority in the Indian parliament.
#2 Our previous President was a Dalit.
#3 The guy who wrote the Indian constitution was a Dalit.
#4 Former Prime Minister Deve Gowda was a Dalit.
#5 The former Chief Justice of India was a Dalit
#6 You get the point.
(Always a risky business to shoot your mouth while knowing too little.)
All as a result of the searing anger...misplaced...by an American populace being exploited by phoney-free-trader politicians who have actually made it punitively uncompetitive to do major and necessary services, as well as production, in the United States.
The whirlwind will be reaped by all of us.
Yes. The outsourcers need to be punished and hard, because they have greased the skids by enabling the rotten politicians to set up the rules favoring this scam...and then going for it and pocketing the proceeds, while their U.S. customers are milked until the strong dollar fueling the profits here finally is strip mined enough to collapse despite all the usual strengths of our economy. These outsourcers Lining their pockets with money getting golden parachutes and options, and their political croney's getting campaign funds, speaking engagement fees, travel expenses, honoraria, book deals, etc.
I have been warning everyone in the Conservative Movement that we are faced not with a slight dip in 2006/8, but perhaps a tidal wave. The reason is that there is a very real hubris by some of our politicians in the majority. A fatal hubris. One that will kill our movement if not stopped dead in its tracks.
The hubris that needs to be excised is manifested by its poster-child. Would-be Presidential candidate...Newt Gingrich (dumping his cripped ex wife for a new racier model from his intern staff...and after the divorce building a swank McMansion with moneys he claimed never to have had...and delivering a worthless "contract" to the citizens of the U.S. We want SMALLER government.) is rife throughout the party. I don't condemn Tom DeLay for starting this, but his lax mode of operation has furthered many others to follow Gingrich's examples. We need MORAL discipline up on the Hill, not just Party Discipline on roll call votes.
I do hold George W. Bush fully accountable, however. The Buck Stops There. The President is fully complicit in every corrupt "good" bill, every pork-ridden bag of money, every UNCONSTITUTIONAL bill he cheerily signed while braying Liberal Platitudes.
When the President WON'T VETO, to help insititute and maintain philosophical, and financial integrity... the Congress is left rudderless, it lends itself INSTANTLY to a dominance by those amongst it who are "out for themselves".
Karl Rove has long admired former President William McKinley. But it sure is not evident in this presidency. McKinley favored U.S. production over foreign dependency. I have long contended that the closest approximation that we are seeing to past presidents is Warren G. Harding. If we don't as a Party get our act together "hanging together" and WHIP SOME SENSE into all the offenders...we will all be hung seperately by the enemy.
And it won't be pretty.
Thanks. I think you proved the point a few others had posted.
Lol, I was wondering how long it would take the India-philes to drop in.
I DID say it wrong. They "RE-INVENT" words. I worked with Indians (in a clerical atmosphere) for five years. "Inventing" words in one of the 250 Indian languages seems appropriate. RE-INVENTING words in English WAS stupid. One of the first I recall was "pre-pone" as the opposite of "postpone."
What annoyed me was their arrogance about it. But it also amused me because 1. what they reinvented was usually just nonsense and 2. they HAD to speak English to each other because their own country has so many languages and they are all SOOO arrogant that THEIR Indian language was superior to all the other Indian languages that they could never, ever come together to agree on one Indian language, so were stuck with English--and that annoyed them. Harhar.
If you speak with a Hindi speaker, HE will insist that Hindi is the "superior" language. If you speak with a Bengali, Gujrati or whatever-speaker, EACH will insist that HIS language is the superior one. It's quite amusing because each is so predictably sure.
So they butcher English, both oral and written and insist that they know SO much better than, especially, the barbaric Americans. They haven't got a pot to piss in but they insist that because their civilization is so old that they are better. Arrogance is always annoying when there is NOTHING to be arrogant about.
Mostly, no one cares, perhaps except a few Indiaphiles like you. I sure don't but enjoy remembering their English-inventions of jibberish. Harhar, what a joke they were. It was fun to watch their stupid letters come back with corrections all over the place. They were so dumbfounded and irritated that their jibberish wasn't accepted as "standard English."
Yes, I always did say "I TOLD you so" ONLY because they were always and always so arrogant about Americans being so stupid and naive. :o) Thanks for giving me a chance to reminisce.
Looks like you can't debate my points and have to resort to fiction to make your case. Why don't you start you own thread to indulge in your bizarre fantasies?
Umm. Sure. I did't see anyone saying that discrimination was purely an Indian phenomenon. You kept arguing that point with yourself.
I don't have to start my own thread to indulge in my own "bizarre fantasies". I'm having a great time watching you make an ass of yourself on this one.
I have never been to India, so I will refrain from making a blanket judgment about Indians. However, my son's asthma doctor is Indian, and while very reserved, he is extremely well mannered and thorough.
Also, I recently bought a Dell computer and had to speak with three or four Indians. They were all very polite, especially one gentleman. I did get very aggravated with the inability of several of them to do what I needed done, but I didn't hold them personally at fault. They all were trying hard
Well, that doesn't say much for Dell computers or the 3/4 Indians who couldn't help you. I would rather speak with ONE person, Indian or not, arrogant or not, who could SOLVE the problem, rather than speaking with three, however polite and trying-hard they were. Shows that they were ill-trained or dumb....both of those sad cases would go back to Dell computers.
If I were these Indians I WOULD hold Dell at fault for not training me well. Since you got "very aggravated" with the incompetence of three of them, I hope you TOLD Dell. Outsourcing has its limits.
As far as I am concerned, yes, you are.
Callers don't have the right to be rude, but often callers are rightfully aggravated. Whoever has to deal with the aggravated people ought to be very well trained and mature enough to deal with it.
Outsourcing annoys me, basically. But our tax laws don't give businesses much of a choice. That goes back to Congress.
Companies KNOW we Americans DON'T like speaking with the foreigners but they don't care because they are looking at their profits and shareholders.
They are forced to outsource because American workers are too expensive and our tax laws don't allow them to make the profit they would make with the expensive American workers.
2. I'm sorry! There aren't too many racist bigots worse than Indian/Pakistani ones. Their culture is so old that they feel entitled to be that way. Too bad their countries are third world sewers. They get what they pay for, so to speak.
The only asses on this thread and you and your ignorant ilk. Looks like your point about Condi Rice et al. has been demolished quite thoroughly. Next time, read up before you post nonsense, will ya?
Hey, GK...leave him/her/it alone. Don't bother reciting facts to people who have no interest in learning the truth.
They DO get impatient and lose their cool easily because they are so accustomed to being big fish in a little and very, very putrid pond. They are especially condescending with Americans. Lot of envy there as well.
It annoys the holy pie outta them to be such an old culture and to be so disrepected by Americans.
We DON'T respect the longevity of their culture because it's all brought them to a modern-day country that is a third world SEWER .... with astounding poverty, disease, ignorance and a religion that appears to have been the result of way too many fairy tales and acid trips. Hinduism DOESN'T export well. The Americanization of Hinduism is ... amusing, at best.
Aren't you overgeneralizing quite generously? I mean, there are more Indians who love the US than you indicate.
You've nailed it!
I HOPE you get your Broadband....very soon.
I always insist on speaking with "Bob" from Nebraska or "Fred" from Iowa. PULEEZE, get me the geek from the Midwest, he KNOWS what he's doing!!!
Your granddaughter has been inculcated by left-wing liberals, public schools, MSM and parents who .... well, didn NOT contradict the aforementioned indoctrinators.
Also, she is very young and WILL grow out of it. Somewhere in her mid-30's, when her taxes are through the roof and her own daughter decides that mom is an idiot she-devil who knows so much less than all her own girlfriends, your granddaughter will have an epiphany: she will grow up and realize how right YOU were.
Live long to be around when what goes around comes around. THAT's a good reason to live! :o):o) Hang in there, grandma.
"There aren't too many racist bigots worse than Indian/Pakistani ones."
Look who is talking. Your feelings toward India indicate YOUR racist feelings....did you lose your job to a more qualified Indian?
"Sure he did and since he was inventing words in English, that was acceptable. Indians inventing words in English is just stupid and those words sound mostly like jibberish. "
All countries where english is spoken invent their own words starting from this country itself. Show me 1 english country where words havent been invented. Its you who sounds stupid.
I have spoken with enough tech support people in the US to know that few of them really understand their job.Fact is that whether its US or India the people who really understand computers dont work in Support. They do better things. Get it?
....did you lose your job to a more qualified Indian?
Its actually to a much CHEAPER Indian...
I have found that most of the Hindu customer service people are much more polite and helpful than my fellow Americans.
Myself, I'd rather call Punjab than Massachusetts any day...
LOL! You think too highly of yourself.
1. Yes, I DO have negative stereotyped feelings about India....but also about Pakistan. Don't forget the Pakis. But, it isn't racism because I really DON'T feel superior to Indians or Pakistanis because of race. The shoe's on the other foot.
But, I know racism when I see it and THEY got it. They DO feel superior by virtue of race.
I DO have negative stereotypes but that isn't racist either. Racism, as a part of elitism, has to, by definition, stem from feelings of superiority by virtue of just race. I don't feel that way; they do.
2. BWAHAHAHAHA! THANK YOU for that snide, racist, snotty reply. You thereby VALIDATE, in spades, everything I have written.
No, I didn't lose my job. I worked for ARAMCO. We Americans were second-class citizens. The Saudis were the first-class citizens. Europeans were 3rd class citizens. Other Arabs were 4th class citizens. Other Muslims were 5th class citizens, like Turks and Persians.
Indians and Pakistanis were 10th class citizens. They were even lower than Philippinos or Koreans. Harhar. The Philippinos and Koreans had the brains to treat the Saudis with a modicum of respect and politeness, being guest workers in their country.
The Indians and Pakistanis considered the Saudis even lower than the Americans. The Saudis couldn't care less, of course, because THEY had/have all the money. But, they don't give the Indians and Pakistanis any slack. They keep them at low pay grades and, mostly, ignored them. What goes around......
Again, thank you for validating my negative stereotype. You did it SO well.
Talking to an Indian friend of mine about expanding business opportunities into India and he was adament that he would NEVER go back there on a permanent basis.
You noticed that too about him? :o)
The smarter fellow would simply leave this thread and move on to another thread....or site.
"Yes, I DO have negative stereotyped feelings about India...."
Racism is based on generalization an people's characteristics - you seem to have no problems tarring all Indians with the same brush. Your admission is quite revealing too.
Thanks for the advice on leaving the thread and this site. Last time I checked, you weren't the only one paying the bills here. Don't like being called on your generalizations, do you?
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