What did you do for a summer job? Andrew Marantz got himself something quite unique: he worked at an Indian call center. Did you get your printer fixed over the phone? Talked to someone about refinancing your mortgage? Perhaps you've spoken to someone like him.
Andrew told his tale over at Mother Jones, which includes some rather interesting observations about Australian (apparently they're touchy about their pets) and American cultures:
Next is "culture training," in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. "The most marketable skill in India today," the Guardian wrote in 2003, "is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else's."
Link - via metafilter
Apparently quite a lot.
I applied for a technical support position at MRO software, who hires their own support staff and pays them a healthy salary of $70,000/year. It might have worked out, but it didn't, never-the-less I realized how much I was getting shafted.