(no subject)

[owl]

My dad phoned up BT about the fault in the line. Unhappily, they persist in outsourcing their call centres to India. I have to wonder what the employees make of someone speaking broad Ulster-Scots. I can hardly understand it over the phone and I live in the same country! Mutual unintelligibility is all I can imagine happening. They kept telling us that someone will phone back at two o'clock. Possibly that's two o'clock Himalayan time, because it certainly didn't happen at 2pm BST. Grrr.

I'm toying with the idea of doing NaNo this year. I'm not liking the thought of counting words in longhand (that's the way I write all my first drafts). There are three things I might write: a Star Wars fanfic I've been meaning to write for years, a rather nebulous idea for original SF, or the semi-autobiographical thing that everybody's supposed to write at the first attempt.

Comments

[yubsie]

I'll never understand why they insist on putting NaNo in NOVEMBER. Horrid month.

[owl]

True.

[yubsie]

That's the end of the semester. I'll probably write 50 000 words of TERM PAPERS. :p

[owl]

Our exams happen in January.

[yubsie]

Ours are at the beginning of December, so November is a STUPID time for NaNo. Couldn't it be in, like, the SUMMER? :p

[owl]

But people go on holiday in the summer.

[yubsie]

But you can write while on holidays. Can't write when writing term papers. :p

[owl]

Well, now....

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten NaNo was coming up. Yay. I never do it, because I'm always away at Whitby for the first few days of November, but I like the way my friends list fills up with people talking about writing.

[owl]

It was hearing everyone talking about it last year that put the idea into my head now.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Not very helpful, but I recall an incident long, long ago when outsourcing wasn't even heard of, when I was working for what was then the North Thames Gas Board.

A customer phoned in with a complaint and got Jimmy, who had such a broad Irish accent that even we often had to ask him to repeat what he was saying. After a while she hung up in frustration. Ten minutes later Francis took a call, satisfactorily resolved in about five minutes. He hung up, put his head on his arms and was almost sobbing with laughter. When he could speak again he told us that it was the customer who had been speaking to Jimmy, and had ended up by saying,

"What a relief to hear a proper English voice!"

Francis was from Goa.

[owl]

*giggle*