One Night @ the Call Centre: Don’t Forget the 35:10 Rule

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One Night @ the Call Centre: Don’t Forget the 35:10 Rule

6/14/2006

By Terry Calhoun

Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat was a good read, insightful, and thought-provoking. I read his columns in the New York Times regularly and can count on more of the same each time, but I don’t recall that he addressed the 35:10 Rule. He may not even know about it. Ditto for William Gibson; he of “The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”

I hadn’t previously realized that out in some of those “other” places, people might think we Americans are pretty stupid. I can sort of handle people envying us, or hating us due to ideological beliefs, or their own ignorance, but I can’t handle the fact that they think we’re stupid.

I’ve probably never been as shocked, in recent memory, as when I read about the 35:10 Rule. Boiled down, this rule (allegedly taught to Indians in overseas call centers outsourced from the U.S.) represents the belief that 35-year-old American consumers are about as smart as 10-year-old Indian kids.

On the other hand, why I was shocked? I already knew that American “apple pie” corporation, General Motors, was selling gas-guzzlers to some buyers in Florida and California and guaranteeing them the difference between $1.99 per gallon and whatever price gasoline rises to for the vehicle’s lifetime. Could there be a clearer example of short-term, next-quarter-profit-based, myopic corporate vision? If our corporations are that stupid, then…

Well, yes, but that could be another story.

So, the gist of Friedman’s thing is that technology, especially information technology, has created a world without much topography in terms of what used to be barriers to sharing ideas, products, services, and other such things that previously existed in a world without fax machines, the Internet, and cheap long-distance telephone service. His focus is on business and commerce, though, and the insistence that nationalism must give way to globalization.

Gibson’s famous NPR quote indicates that pretty much any technology that we are going to be able to experience or use in our remaining lifetimes and those of close-succeeding generations is already “out there” somewhere. Maybe only a handful of people know about it or can afford it, and perhaps at the moment no one knows its importance. But the future is out there; just not spread out evenly.

That’s a sadly limiting thought because the single greatest dissonance in our culture’s technology advances, to me, is the growing gap between how much information can flow – fast and in quantity – over large physical distances, compared to the limitations on physical travel that we still face. Those limitations are likely to get even greater as we face the fact that the brute force and energy used to move materials and humans (relatively) quickly around the planet are harmful (force) and limited (energy).