Just... insane, Lingo, Them gizmos

Apparently, it's called "outsourcing". Someone, somewhere, at some point, had the brilliant idea to move parts of a company's operations to another country in which the costs for each employee is substantially less compared to where it was in the first place.

I won't deny that I'm not aware of the economic reasoning behind this idea, but please, corporate big mucky-mucks, can't you see it's really screwing the rest of us?

A while back, I was personally affected by this stupid idea when I had reasons to call Customer Support at HP. I was in process of purchasing a HP Pavilion dv9000t laptop (and more to come about that whole mess at a later time), and had hit a roadblock that forced me to pick up the phone.

I was redirected through the phone lines of the world to... India. First of all, I want to make it clear that I've never been to India but I'm sure it's a lovely place. The loveliness of the country, however, has very little to do with the fact that using it as a base for your Customer Support is a bad idea. I'm not a native English speaker, and even though my command of the language is pretty decent, I still have trouble understanding certain regional dialects. No surprise, Indian English is one of them.

So, there I was, talking to a guy whose dialect I had problems comprehending, over a crappy connection. Admittedly, I was in a car at that specific point, talking on a cell-phone, so I guess I partly contributed to that. In any case, he was reading from a written script in front of him and from what I could gather, he really didn't have much experience with... anything. Grossly incapable of in any way helping me solve my problem; the conversation lasted for 20 minutes and in the end, there was no progress or revealed new information. Part of the reason why it took so long was that we had to go through at least four repetitions of "Please Hold, Sir" before I finally understood whatever it was he was trying to say.

I so much, much prefer communication over the internet.