Hello? World Calling!

One of the things I like about my job, is when the phone rings and it’s someone calling me from India.

I get excited when it’s an apparently remote or out of the way country: not America or Australia. They’re too easy and obvious and full of white people who’ve been making phone calls for years. I mean Brazil or Kenya or Kazakhstan. Interesting, exotic places.

I love that by pressing a few buttons I’m connected to people who just a decade ago, didn’t even register on the average British person’s radar and often still don’t.

I love the technology behind the fact that, last Thursday I needed to speak to a colleague. I dialled his mobile number and he picked up.  While talking to him, he nearly got run over by a bicycle. In a street in Shianghai.

Incredible.

I have to stop myself from asking irrelevant questions when, for example, I was talking to a guy manning Dell technical support in Bangalore. He was a sarcastic bugger – I asked where he was, he replied “India”. I asked where specifically, he said “India. It’s in Asia, have you heard of it?” but I suppose he was a bit wary of me being one of the many racists who write off call centre staff simply because they’re not in this country. I found him polite, knowledgeable and helpful and he spoke better English and was probably better educated than many English people.

Sometimes, like for train times, it helps to be in the same country. Most of the time it’s irrelevant: like when fixing hard drives that were made in China anyway.

What I’d really like to ask isn’t “can you help me fix my hard-drive?”, it’s “where do you live? what do you do for fun? who are your friends and family? what do they do? what does your city look like?”.

I wish it was the done thing, but no doubt they have their call quotas to fill and at 50p a second I can’t talk for long. But wouldn’t it be nice if, after finishing your banking you could just have 30 seconds to learn a little bit about each other?