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One Night @ the Call Centre: Don’t Forget the 35:10 Rule
6/14/2006
We can do now what is indistinguishable from magic a generation ago with light waves, radiation, ones, and zeros. But physically moving products or ourselves around takes brute force and energy. How long can we keep it up? And where on earth is the unevenly-distributed technology that will do it? I don’t see anything on the horizon that purports to move physical objects over long distances without a lot of force and the consumption of a lot of energy. Do you?
As 3,000+ higher education leaders prepare to fly to Hawaii for the Campus of the Future: A Meeting of the Minds conference, options are being prepared for attendees to voluntarily purchase carbon offsets for their travel – like the sticker I buy for my own Chevy Suburban each year. (Yes, I need it; and it has averaged over 50 PMPGs since I bought it.) But I have to admit that each time I fly now, I give second and third thoughts to the necessity of the trip versus an ever-growing list of costs that are more and more evident.
So, information flows swiftly all over and around this flat earth, but physical things less so. Partly that’s good, because some of the nasty things that people would like to physically send to each other turn out to be weapons. But it sure can lead to misleading understandings. Or insights.
In the novel, One Night @ The Call Centre, (recently made into a movie) the author:
[D]escribes the frustrations of highly educated Indians giving helpline advice to a series of unintelligent Americans who need assistance on understanding how to use ovens and vacuum cleaners. There is office flirtation and marital infidelity, with plenty of weeping in the toilets.
Here new trainees are taught the ‘35:10 rule’ on day one. ‘A 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s brain. This will help you understand your clients,’ training instructors explain. (Hi, It’s Bollywood Calling)
Did we really need to know that the person on the other end of our customer support call is not only difficult to understand (as much our fault as his or hers…or rather, no one’s fault), but may also be mocking our stupidity or ignorance?
Maybe we at least need to be able to say, “Wait a minute, our 10-year olds are smarter than we are, too.” I know who I turn to when I need a new vacuum cleaner taken out of the box and assembled. If I want help putting something new together or understanding how the thermostat controls work, I ask my kids.
I wonder if those Indian kids are going to end up as deeply in debt once they finish their education as our kids? Will they live in a world where having lived on campus at Harvard really d'esn’t matter as much as how much they know and what they can do? Will they like us? Will we care? I predict the following will be a growing perspective, and one that we will find it extremely difficult to alter:
One of the book’s her'es, Varun (or Victor for work purposes) declares: ‘An air-conditioned sweat shop is still a sweatshop. In fact, it is worse because nobody sees the sweat. Nobody sees your brain getting rammed.’
Later he adds: ‘My friends, I am angry. Because every day I see some of the world’s strongest and smartest people in my country. I see all this potential, yet it is all getting wasted.’
‘An entire generation up all night, providing crutches for the white morons to run their lives.’
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