Comments on: Any opportunity to call a foreigner a terrorist, eh?

By: Weekend Links – A very kind offer at C64GLeN – The blog of Glen McNamee

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:24:42 +0000

[...] Daily Mail also gets a kicking this week from Dan at minute44 in ANY OPPORTUNITY TO CALL A FOREIGNER A TERRORIST, septicisle in a Truly amoral Newspaper, fivechinesecrackers’ Whatever happened to sack them [...]

By: Dan Schonhaar

Dan Schonhaar — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:37:30 +0000

Haha! Yeah the Anglicised names are fantastic… like our friend Andrewjohn. Pure gold.

By: Ste

Ste — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:33:46 +0000

I’d sooner struggle with my problem than speak to any “Kevin” in a foreign callcentre.

Call after call, They fail to understand tone and meaning of the words I say to them when trying to describe my problem. God help you if you have an issue with something that’s not on their list and requires something out of the ordinary to resolve. They just completely fail to grasp what your trying to tell them.

I totally agree with Dan’s comment on UK arms of companies being wholly UK based. You can be sure there won’t be any misunderstandings when it comes to parting you from your money.

By: Olly

Olly — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:45:21 +0000

Its hit and miss..

Ive had UK based call centre operatives who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag, too…

Some indian ones are brill – it depends on who you get.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:44:19 +0000

I’ve worked in technical support over the phone before, and I’ve worked for a credit card company in their sales department on the phone all day every day.

I’ve heard people say all sorts of things when the phone was muted, or when they thought the phone was muted. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that someone said something like that, but I also don’t doubt that the guy was being a total prick to the support guy.

It goes both ways. You get mental people on both ends of the phone if you have enough staff and enough customers.

By: Magua

Magua — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:43:54 +0000

I recall watching a programme on call centres abroad during the big media scare-mongering which has lasted, even in adverts [See Churchill], for years.
The call centre jobs in India are sought after jobs, and although we scorn the job over here, to them it was a massive step up in society and came with respect. Not hard believing if you look at some of the other programmes on the clothes factories and food factories, getting to sit down and have a chat must be a luxury.
That was a few years ago now, possible 2-3, so unless they suddenly started breeding English-hating employees with perfect understanding of English, it still just doesn’t sit right. The more i’ve thought about it since my last post, the more ridiculous it is.

By: Dan Schonhaar

Dan Schonhaar — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:33:59 +0000

Ha! The call centre guy was probably brushing up on his westernisms and said “How would you like it if I dropped the F-Bomb on you, eh!?”

But seriously, you’re right. He might be working for a stupidly small number of rupees a day but as much as the language barrier annoys me I’ve never once come across a foreign call centre operator that treated me with anything but the utmost respect. Typically they’ll have impeccable manners because they’re reading off a script. I doubt this guy would even know the English to express the alleged threat, let alone have the desire to make it.

By: Magua

Magua — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:25:50 +0000

For love nor money i would never expect anyone that is in need of keeping their job and probably is a nice empathetic person [Kind of a rule of working in customer service/Call centre job] to suddenly change and start making terrorist accusations to a customer; Especially when it is being recorded.
And like most places i know they listen back to at least 5/10 calls their staff make for their “training purposes”/security issues.

The amount of times i’ve wanted to physically beat someone down to the ground and give them a few kicks in the groin for the comments they have made about me and my friends at work, comments far, far worse than what is apparently being thrown at the customer in this story. Yet ive never as much as dropped a swear word to them, much less than threaten to blow them up.

It just does not happen.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:14:28 +0000

It still seems more likely that it was a combination of drugs and alcohol that caused it though. Even if it’s a pre-existing condition the smoking couldn’t have helped it out. There seems to be a tendency for famous people to try various drugs, that’s a bit of a sweeping generalisation, but it’s not entirely unfounded, and certainly appears to be the case with Gately. He may only have tested positive for marijuana that night, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do other things before that caused permanent harm to his body. That seems to be a much simpler explanation than just mysteriously dying in your sleep. It also has nothing to do with the fact that he was homosexual.

Occam’s Razor says the simpler theory is often the correct one.

I don’t condone the gay bashing at the end of the article at all. It’s disrespectful, and just plain stupid. I still don’t think the article is offensive to Gately in particular.

By: Dan Schonhaar

Dan Schonhaar — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:02:10 +0000

@Stu – I’m not sure I agree…

“The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.”

Yeah they do, as sad as that is. Charley Brooker cites a couple of examples here. It just doesn’t happen often and as such is very rarely in the public eye. A trained, qualified coroner has confirmed this.

It just goes to show that the Mail is such a worthless rag that they’ll happily rather print the misguided, offensive ramblings of a bigoted, blinkered old cow than put the effort and dedication into finding, developing and tactfully printing a relevant worthwhile story.