alt Hacker NewsI fucking hate this. This is a literally racist technology. What's next? Painting everyone's face white on Zoom? Why don't you just fucking ask for clarification?
One of my cousins works for a call center from the Philippines - or used to, anyway. He would comment on how callers would ask to immediately be escalated to a manager upon hearing his accent despite speaking perfectly fluent - even native proficiency - English.
It's hard to describe how this affects your self-esteem and self-image, especially when it gets to the point where Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible. You are now altering your identity in order to appease some racist shithead overseas and fit into their projection of what the world ought to look and sound like.
My mother was proud of the fact that she had "no accent" and laboured for years to make that the case. Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.
Just goes to show how fucking full of shit Canadians are when they parade around their "commitment to diversity and inclusion." Orwellian lies and lip service, from both Telus for enacting these measures, and the callers who presumably spurred Telus to take this action.
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I had a Southern accent and had to train it out because my northern colleagues kept making fun of it. I noticed that I was perceived as "smarter" without it. My story is not exactly uncommon and there are a bunch of famous people (e.g. Stephen Colbert) who did the same thing.
> Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible
Oh, so they have strong Swedish accents? Or South African?
On the topic of racism, skin colors don't have a particular sound.
It's also hard to describe the feeling of watching the entire world infiltrate your culture.
>Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.
Are they adjusting their tagalog accent too or so?
Either way. Consider how it feels elsewhere where the majority of such calls are not anywhere close to "native proficiency" English,...or Dutch or German or what have you and it's instead thick accents to the point you end up making your grandparents calls for them. It also doesn't help when they don't understand already suppressed and half erased local dialects/accents of the region they're servicing. Which indeed contributes to "erasure of an entire people's way of speech"
It also doesn't help that these people are often on the other side of the goddamn world and have usually a lot lot less tie-in to the company (if they even work directly for it) than when you get someone local on the line. I remember having to call one such company half a dozen times to get someone to understand that: no i was not the 1000th regular customer using one of their devices but wanted to make software that connects to it and had questions about their dev kit. It was the most infuriating experience figuring out again and again whether they couldn't understand the words i was using or just couldn't grasp that someone had a question that was unusual and didn't fit the scripts that they seemed to try to pull back to. In the end i had to weasel my way into the dm's of someone i once met working there who then immediately connected me to someone at the right department.
And everyone is abjectly aware that all this is just local companies outsourcing and suppressing wages.
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What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team? This happened many times. Is this racism or a practical inconvenience?
I find the sensitivity on this topic regarding racism kind of overshadowing the practical aspect of not being able to understand what the other person is saying.
We offer people in our company English language training, because we’re a world wide remote company and everyone should be able to understand each other. Is this racism as well?