Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!texbell!chinacat!telecom-gateway From: klg@dukeac.UUCP (Kim Greer) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: AT&T Operator Handling of International DA Message-ID: Date: 1 Dec 89 11:53:53 GMT Sender: news@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG Reply-To: klg@dukeac.UUCP (Kim Greer) Organization: Academic Computing, Duke University, Durham, NC Lines: 40 Approved: telecom-request@chinacat.lonestar.org X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 546, message 1 of 8 >>.................................... many operators are very poorly >>trained, and the customer is always wrong and knows nothing of what he >>speaks. Do any operators speak a second language? No! Do any realize >>how phone systems work in other countries? No! For people griping about operators not speaking a second language, please remember: In India alone (where the complainer was complaining about) there are literally scores of _spoken_ languages. It is unrealistic to expect the local or the remote operator, picked essentially at random, to be fluent in your specific one. (Granted: English is widely spoken in India). >>speaks. Do any operators speak a second language? No! Take a poll: How many people on the street in the US speak a second language well enough to tell a non-English speaking operator what phone services they would like? I think you will find there are not many, percentage-wise. Operators are not language junkies; they are (educationally) ordinary people for the most part. >>speaks. Do any operators speak a second language? No! Which ones would you like them to speak: English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese (lots of dialects), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Farsi, Russian (lots of variants), Italian, Turkish, Gaelic, Tamil, [lots of Papua-New Guinea variants], Greek, Arabic, Swahili, ... ? Another "Granted": English is widely spoken throughout the world (though not necessarily with an accent easily understandable to many Americans) __BUT__ English is not spoken by the majority of the world's inhabitants. Don't expect instant, unscheduled translation services for the cost of Int. DA.