There are always exceptions to the rule and when I answer the phone and the guy says my name is Sam yet he is from India or Indonesia......yeah right!! Keep believing your diatribe!Christian converts in India often take Christian names.
It's quite common to find Adam, Eve, Matthew, Mary, John, Jane, Paul, Jemima, Peter, Naomi, etc. in India as the given names.
Your incredulous to believe that just because one person out a million is named Sam or Steven negates what the OP said is true!!OP seems to be incredulous at the possibility that somebody in Bangalore could be named Steven. I'm saying it happens and is legit.
Also, my very christian parents named their kids after pre-christian figures. And my white-trash cousins did the made-up-sort-of-native-american-sounding stripper name thing for their kids.
There are always exceptions to the rule and when I answer the phone and the guy says my name is Sam yet he is from India or Indonesia......yeah right!! Keep believing your diatribe!
Don't blame these guys for taking on a Western name. The companies they work for apparently believe Western people will favor someone with a Western name. So it's not the fault of the caller. They are doing what they think will make them more money.
It seems like more and more Chinese have western first names too. Whats kinda funny is they are sometimes old school western names, like Beatrice, Eunice, etc.
The problem is that you cannot open your eyes enough to understand that these call centers are based in India and other places and they understand that it makes people from America feel more at ease if we are talking with somebody with an "American sounding" name!!This is exactly the ignorance that I was talking about above. I understand that you are picking 'Sam' as (what you thought to be) a random 'American' name, but there are two (well known/local celebrity) Indonesian 'Sam' who were born in the 1920s and 1940s (they are both singers), and I personally know at least two Sams that were born in the 1970s. These are not 'exceptions to the rule', and hundreds of thousands of 'Sams' probably exist in Indonesia in the past 100 years (yes I was guessing, but it's not unrealistic in a country of 250 million people).
The truth is you have zero idea about how people are really named in these countries, so stop talking about things you don't know about.
I found that to be true!! Well said!!As a person who has really wirked in a call center( Dell Technical support), here is my side of the story.
1, Your companies believe the American consumer is a dumb retard and this is 90% true. This forum might be an exception, but it is true for the most part. The average American simply finds it impossible to pronounce foreign names.
2, Don't think a tech support guy in America is a whiz while all Indians read from scripts. We had access to the performance metrics of all teams globally and the American ones were below average, Realize that our competition for performance scores was global.
3. The American names given to any rep was a variation of that rep's last names. All complex names were reduced to simple names and this included complicated names of American techs too.
4. We were completely honest with the customers all the time. If the customer asked for our original names, we gave them the same unhesitatingly.
5. 99.99% of our customers were nice people. A rep would encounter a dick very rarely.
This was my experience in Dell over a decade ago.
also true....They're not exactly wrong, all people are naturally more at ease with those they identify with, but a person with an awful Indian accent telling you that their name is John is a bit like Superman putting on some glasses and pretending to be some reporter... while his cape billows in the wind.
Frankly, it's insulting to the customers and the employees.
The problem is that you cannot open your eyes enough to understand that these call centers are based in India and other places and they understand that it makes people from America feel more at ease if we are talking with somebody with an "American sounding" name!!
Truth is I know quite a bit more than you do about India! In Indian society American names are not the norm....regardless if they are Christian or NOT!!
Sure you can find exceptions to the rule.....so lets see in a country at last count of 1.25 Billion as of 2013.......just for kicks lets say 1/2 are men...of course we know that's not accurate...could be more or less....
So what do you believe the percentages are when comparing Indians with Indian names and Indians with American names?? can`t be higher than 100,000 at best which wouldn`t even be close to 1%....so what exactly was your point???
You mentioned specifically about Indonesia and how a name 'Sam' is ridiculous. <-- I did not say or use the word ridiculous! You did..truth hurts huh?
I was telling you that you have no idea what you're talking about.<-- again you are wrong!!
My point is that you made a huge mistake in making Indonesia as your example. We have a few posters here from Indonesia and they will confirm to you that Indonesian's names are taken from all over the world, especially nowadays.
It's also "kind of" a xenophobic and even low-level racist thread.
As has been pointed out more than once:
1) Such names do exist in India. Imagine that!
2) Elsewise, these CSR's are instructed to assume an easily digested White Man Name.
Show some class. Show some empathy for these (low) wage drones. Please put a semi-mature check on your reactive intolerance. You're a much better man than that.
Hold on a second my man. You aren't Indian are you? Why are you being offended about a harmless observation made by someone when actual Indians like me aren't? You missed the posts that were actually offensive like this one, and instead made a big deal of a trivial issue, forcing one of the more rational and constructive members of the forum to quit.
Not cool man. Not cool at all. :\
Hold on a second my man. You aren't Indian are you? Why are you being offended about a harmless observation made by someone when actual Indians like me aren't? You missed the posts that were actually offensive like this one, and instead made a big deal of a trivial issue, forcing one of the more rational and constructive members of the forum to quit.
Not cool man. Not cool at all. :\
Meanwhile Fred met a stranger on the walk home who could see the anguish on his face. The stranger asked him what was wrong and Fred lauched into a speech about the days events and said about how no matter how hard the universe seemed to push against him he would fight until his last breath to support his 19 wives and 47 children.
The passion in Freds speech was all it took for the stranger who was a massive Bollywood producer to make him an offer he couldn't possibly refuse.
Fred got dropped off at his door that night by a limo. The $500 in his pocket did little to numb the strange taste in the back of his mouth but he knew he could feed his family that month.
I think you guys are mistaken if you're taking this discussion into racism vs not-racism. I personally don't think that there's anything racist about the original post. I just think it is borderline xenophobic to joke about not believing that people from certain countries are named a certain way. The implication is that these people don't deserve to be named X or Y and therefore they must be lying. You simply have to believe that implication otherwise the joke is not funny at all.
I think you guys are mistaken if you're taking this discussion into racism vs not-racism. I personally don't think that there's anything racist about the original post. I just think it is borderline xenophobic to joke about not believing that people from certain countries are named a certain way. The implication is that these people don't deserve to be named X or Y and therefore they must be lying. You simply have to believe that implication otherwise the joke is not funny at all.
Way to project!
Nothing close to that was implied. Care to tell us why you think people in India don't deserve a white name?