you know you're trapped in an office

when you step outside and blink to the blinding intensity of actual sunlight. Good times.

And speaking of good times, I made an interesting call to Intuit's customer support line today at work. I find the practices of "Americanizing" Indian call center employees rather offensive and unhelpful, and Intuit really takes this to an extreme. (Ok, I don't actually know whether they are an extreme case or the norm, but I don't feel like researching right now. Tough luck.) Yes, I'm a big fan of learning English (the primary impediment for Mexican immigrants, by the way, to being accepted and assimilated by large segments of the population), but that really has little to do with it. It's not even the fact that he goes by "Steve"; after all, "Eric", a guy who just left at work, was a little more familiar than "Ye", although Ye isn't particularly difficult as they can go sometimes.

What did it more for me was the tight control of the phrasing, and how he has to be incredibly passive and accommodating. Any conversation about software support is going to involve some moments of both people talking at once, yet this necessitated an obviously canned response at once apologizing for interrupting me and making sure I said what I needed to say. That level of training and monitoring turns what would be pleasantries in a more natural, interactive conversation into these odd formalities that wreak of everything that's wrong with corporate control of people's behavior.

And don't think for a second that they don't monitor everything the employees do. At the end of the call, they have a script about staying on the line to answer a couple questions about their service to you. Computer questions, of course, asked by a slightly too sanitary female voice whose only accepted responses are numbers on your keypad. What a great way to catch people who haven't counted to ten yet in their frustration about their software not working.

So I gave "Steve" a 7 out of 7 on the first question about being satisfied with his service.