Well, the scotts have a thick accent as well. They wouldn´t be great for manning telephone operator boards in the US either. Neither would my grandmother do a great job as a Nokia phone operator with the way she puts accents on words and her lack of vocabulary. But she´d probably not be any worse than the one I talked to yesterday.

Don´t equate criticism or praise of verbal skills and pronounciation with racism, that´s really judging yourself out of discussions. Had this been a scot, I´d have said thick scottish accent instead.

A phone operators working tool is his voice and language skills. If he cannot understand the language he is supposed to be working in, or make himself clear, then he´s not fit for the job.

"True" Americans? WTF?

You come here professing undying tolerance and hatred for racism and then exercise exactly the same principals you are fighting against when it comes to "Americans".

First of all: We have a word for "true" Americans, we use "Native" - as in, the people that were here long before "we" showed up. So not only is your statement an absolute falsehood using any "current" definition of the word "American", since by and large "racism" is not an acceptable ideology anymore in the US, and "true" americans in the modern sense of the word is simply people living in the United States of America currently.

But it's also completely wrong relating to a more traditional use of the word American (someone living in the "Americas") since a "True" American in that sense is anybody living in either the North or South America continents - and "true" being taken as "pure", in North America at least, those are "Native" Americans.

As for having people arrested for speaking their minds... we have something called Freedom of Speech here; and having served in the US Military I can quite justly use the phrase "I may not agree with what you're saying, but I'm prepared to die for your right to say it."

So how about taking that holier than thou attitude somewhere else. Identifying an accent on the phone is not racism; and having a lack of communication because of either party or both are having difficulty understanding eachother due to accents or non-fluent languages is also not racist. What matters is that an employee of a company that serve's english speaking customers was unable to adequately express or understand the problem as it stood in english - and therefore is a failure of the employee and the company in providing adequate customer service - in other words, failing to do their job.

This is not racism.. it is a fact. If the OP had used some kind of derogatory nickname for Indians or made negative generalizations, oh wait: such as you just did regarding americans, then I would agree it was racist. But this is what I see:
That sounds like a fact.. not a racist comment. You can replace Indian with any race.. everyone has accents - and when two people are sitting speaking english in two very different and very thick accents.. nobody knows wtf is going on.

"What we have here... is a failure to communicate."

dont forget he referred to him as the 'indian wanker' in his last post. charming...

erm.. I just clicked all 4 pages and searched for "wanker"..

I seem to have completely missed this post... link?

If true, yes - I disagree with such terminology. Though, as I said, has nothing to do with FBI or getting people arrested. Now.. had he professed or advocated people go out and 'beat an indian' in honor of his unfortunate experience.. that would require intervention.

Simply making a statement that "I don't like XYZ" is not, should not, and damn well better never be "illegal" and warrant jail time.

But, as I said, doesn't mean I agree with using racist terms, slangs, or derogatory meanings and over-generalizations.

This illustrates the fact that customer service is a lottery. My contacts with TMO have been disasters. I got wrong and ignorant information. Once I spent about an hour on the phone with them because I had decided to get an expensive prepaid plan, one that required ZERO credit. I was told that the supervisor needed to call me back the next day. I made an appointment for the time.

No one EVER called me back. A few weeks later I got a form letter saying my credit application had been rejected. Repeat, this was a no credit needed, prepaid plan.

It may be that Nokia employs a lot of drones. Drones are usually created by fear. Companies give customer service reps 20 or so questions and very little information or understanding about their jobs. Scary, demanding customers and employers create representatives who are afraid to vary from their scripts.

However, all companies have qualified representatives. You just have to find them. They might speak English poorly or well (ever notice that some of the smartest, best informed people on this site are not necessarily the best writers of English? The same goes for reps)

Please do note the word "tiny" in there though. Turning what should be a five minute or less phone call into a forty-five minute lecture on your life, hobbies, and what you're cooking for dinner will not endear you to the phone operator at the other end of the line. And then she'll come home in a rotten mood.

Err, or so I've heard.

imperiallight is not talking about me, I didn´t call anyone a wanker. He´s talking about Patroclo´s last post, who misspelled "indian worker" as "indian warker" (not wanker).

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...3&postcount=23

So imperiallight´s post is wrong.

You must be talking about this

He said "indian warker" and I believe he meant "worker", not "wanker", and also that isn't the OP - that's the guy professing non-tolerance for a difference of opinion.

ETA: beat by olighak.

I do find that Americans often refer to foreign customer service reps as if they were all poorly informed and reps who spoke good English were all well informed. This is far from true. I have spoken to and worked with many American customer service reps who didn't understand their jobs at all. And yes, I am an American.

I didn't write "wanker" but "wonker" because I wrote in wrong way the word "worker" becaue I have a lot of respect for "workers" in the way it is used in the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!"
But I see that there is who took the grammatical error as a pretext to make believe that I am saying what I don't think at all.
Shame! Shame ! Shame!