This is the greatest line of the greatest Foamy The Squirrel episodes (language NSFW). I'd always treated it a a source of laughs. Well, it's actually true.
I work for a tech company that is global, and by "global" I mean engineering teams in Israel, Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, Colorado, San Jose, Beijing, and Bangalore. Guess which hours of the day conference calls get scheduled?
You Americans are all bastards ...
Well yesterday I had to brief the global field force on somethingorother. The global field force. Meaning, I had to do it twice, once from an all American, God fearin' time zone and once at Ohmygodthirty for the folks in Asia.
Forgive me, those of you across the International Date Line. I had no idea.
Glurb. Blogging will be (hopefully) a bit humbler today ...
7 comments:
I feel your pain. Although I wasn't dealing with international colleagues, I was up past decent time working spreadsheets and validating data and am up again this morning doing the same
Bastards. It has been so long since I spoke with any corporate help lines that spoke with an American accent. I normally don't hear or understand 30% of the words. That makes it very difficult to have any sort of technical response.
BTDT We have operations across the globe. Not sure about being in every time zone, but when the conference is at Oh-my-God-thirty an hour one way or the other just doesn't seem to matter.
Turnabout is fair play, though. When I got sent 8 time zones away, I got to leave messages for folks back home at 2AM their time, though.
Yeah, well, **** happens. Living in GMT-5 or -8, as often as I had to get up in the dark to answer the phone from someone calling from GMT+2 or +9 and decipher fractured English in languages W, X, Y or Z, I kind of lost sympathy for doing it to them. Email is store-and-forward, voice isn't; I became increasingly convinced that the results from live voice communication was not significantly better than well written (and competently translated) email.
Now I need to get the coffee out of my sinuses....
Tech: "Push estar."
Me: "Push estar?"
Tech: "Yes. Push estar."
Me: "What? There is no estar."
Tech: "Push estar."
Me: (One semester of Conversational Spanish kicks in)
"Do you mean push Start?"
Tech: "Yes! Push ESTAR!"
My second job in $metro_region{$current} was with a global financial services firm. The shift (which I actually enjoyed working, but which would be a severe trial to a daywalker) was deliberately crafted to straddle the close of business in Singapore and the opening in London. (And the only observed holidays were Christmas, New Year, and Veteran's Day, because every other holiday we observe here is a nonentity in some other major market. But of course, we also had to keep track of _all_ the civilized world's major holidays, since any individual market being closed meant that our daily reports were screwed up.)
So yeah...sympathies, dude. Been there.
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