Babel

We'd been asked by our support team in the UK to get somebody to look at one of our servers. We'd tried various fixes using their expertise there but nothing had worked. In the end we called out an engineer from APC, the company which built and supplied the server in the first place.

When the guy turned up it was clear that he could not speak a word of English. I don't speak any Kannada and I'm barely technical - turning on my pc in the morning is about as technical as I get. Our support team in the UK are very technical (of course) but also non Kannada speakers (again, of course. I mean, if we as a race, struggle to speak our own language, we're hardly going to be conversant in a Dravidian language). Thankfully we have Kannada speakers and technical people in the office and so we had a situation where, having taken the call, I then passed the phone to one of our local language experts who in turn translated what was being said to the APC engineer.

For his part, he couldn't have been more disinterested had he tried, and while we were doing our best to break down language barriers, he was on the phone to someone else. When he did listen to what was being said he responded along the lines that it was all Dutch to him and that he was going to get a more senior colleague to come and have a look. Our support team in the UK rang off and thankfully, the senior colleague who turned up later that same evening, was able to press the right buttons or replace the right bits which have rectified the problem with that particular server.

I suppose there was an unexpressed expectation on our part that the Indian engineer employed by the Indian company in southern India would speak fluent English. Of course, there's no earthly reason why he should do but we do take it for granted that people will understand what we say, even though large swathes of south India are quite happy with their own local languages. Britons generally get round the language problem by, instead of trying to understand what the other person is saying, shouting the words slowly whilst gesticulating and pointing: YOU... SERVER... FIX... OK? LIGHT BLINKING. STOP LIGHT BLINKING OK?

Thankfully it didn't come to that but it was still a lovely typical Indian story in, of course, a typical Indian setting in India...


Originally published on Blogger on 2nd September 2008. It's a measure of how far I've progressed - or regressed - in a year, that I refered to this as a "lovely Indian story". Today I'd write that it was typically frustrating Indian episode.