I decided to re post this today, two years afterwards, three years after I got laid off. This is the reason I got laid off.

Laugh All You Want, iDorks, But It Worked Like A Dream For Half A Century

Best of all, it was built, operated by and controlled by American Workers. Half the engineering and almost all the call centers are in India these days.

True story. In my last position I was running a legacy phone system at the biggest bank in Boston and the consultants decided to move the help desk (Which used to be fifty Plus operators in Dorcester) to India.

Well the move didn’t go over well with the people in the bank. Finally the Indian manager of the new call center called their bank contact and asked if they could help with a bit of American slang that they didn’t understand. It seemed that they were getting a lot of calls that as soon as the caller heard the voice of the Indian agent they said,“Ahshit” and hung up. What’s “Ahshit” they wondered.  Soon someone got the bright idea that if the agents answering the phones responded using a American sounding name the callers might stay on the line and talk to them. So they made up a list of American sounding names and passed them out to the agents.

Soon after I got a call from a bank supervisor I often worked with. He wanted to tell me that he had called the new help desk and when the new agent answered the call, they said,”Hello… Sara Lee!“.