Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [107]
"Dharmendra and Rishika will play the parts of callers and monitors," Parvati explained. The monitor's job was to correct every stammer, every mispronunciation, and every error in telephone etiquette. "Don't hate the monitor," she instructed her nervous students. "Please don't take the criticism personally." Anjali remembered her first morning in Bangalore, the muttered references to "the Old Bitch," and another lingering mystery was suddenly solved. "When you turn on your computers, you'll see the credit history and the contracts your caller has signed with our client. Your job will be to scan the contracts as you engage the callers. Don't make them feel as though you're reading their credit history. It's just a chat. You're here to help them. You'll have to learn how to integrate a particular complaint with what you're reading on the screen. Some of the callers might be hostile, but you're not to take personal offense. Nothing here is personal."
And then Darren/Dharmendra took over, in perfect English, crisp and authoritative. To the question "Where are you from, sir?" he responded, "I grew up in Delhi."
"You have a good American accent, sir," the student said.
"No, I have the absence of an Indian accent. Among ourselves, we call it a Droid accent."
Before leaving the bay, Parvati posed one final question to her students. "What's the number-one rule of your profession?"
Anjali ventured a guess. "Phone poise?"
"Right. Don't lose your cool no matter what. You lose your cool, the company loses a client, and you lose a job. Best of luck!"
***
THE PHONE IN Anjali's cubicle rang even before she had settled into her chair. The caller's name and address popped up on her screen. Thelma Whitehead of Hot Springs, AR. Alaska or Arkansas? An igloo? Cotton fields? And what kind of name was Whitehead? Wa-wa Indian? Thank goodness, the caller was not from an M state, which she'd never have sorted out. MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT: that was a nightmare. And no doubt the monitor was listening in.
"Hi, this is Janey. How can I help you, Ms. Whitehead?"
Thelma reeled off her problems, which, if Anjali understood correctly, had to do with not having received her Social Security check, which prevented her from paying her bill on time.
And how exactly, Anjali wondered, am I expected to solve your Social Security problems? "Come again, please?" she said.
"What do you mean, come again? I ain't never bin there yet!" Thelma cried. "You don't understand the first thing I bin sayin', do you! I bet you don't even speak our language! Where the hell y'all setting at right now? India? I used to be on y'all's side, but when I get off the phone I'm fixing to call my congressman."
"Miss Thelma, please to calm down!" Stay calm yourself. You're making mistakes because you're too agitated. No job's worth a heart attack!
Thelma Whitehead hung up after one last, inscrutable imprecation: "This ain't all bin did yet!"—Anjali didn't recognize those words as English. If only she could say "Go to hell!" Her own anger shocked her, as it had that day in Minnie's spare room.
"Well, that didn't go too well, did it?" Rishika the monitor broke in. "Let's see how many gaffes I counted. She's not 'Miss Thelma.' This isn't Gone with the Wind. And where did you pull 'Please to calm down' from? I deliberately threw you a curveball with that thick accent, and you didn't respond very well, did you? You were probably seconds away from correcting her. Remember this: when you're running an open telephone line from America, you're going to get every kind of accent and every level of mangled English. You have to interpret it and laugh along with it or respond to it as if it was perfect English from a textbook. Everyone in America speaks a different English. And then, in Thelma Whitehead's sugary Southern accent, the monitor concluded, "Hon, you