Dinner, and the bastard (cc collection guy) from m'umbai calls.

[junker]

the bastard from m'umbai (bombay)

Ok, so I have credit card debt service issues due to unemployment
now reaching 8 months since the software industry exported all the
jobs to india and china. Just an ordinary american, sitting around,
having dinner, trying to find work, and the bastard from M'umbai
calls. For Fleet Bank.

He calls, identifies himself as being from collections for Fleet. He asks
if I am X. I agree. I am X. I hear a slight hindoo accent and immediately
ask for a call back number (afterall I think Fleet has said publically
that they don't export customer jobs overseas). Well the phone is in
Kansas but rings through to India.

I also asked the fellow where he was, physically, and started rattling off
names of Indian towns, Bakrat, Bangalore, Indore, Madras, M'umbai?
Jabalpur ...and there, a slight reaction, so I stopped and went back to
M'umbai? And he agreed, that yes, he was in M'umbai....so I started
getting pissed.

It went from bad to worse...soon he was asking me what I had
intended to do with all the stuff that I had purchased on the credit card?
That I now could not 'suddenly' pay for...well suddenly is not 8 months in
the US of A. I have been out of work for 8 months, I pointed out to him,
and I pointed out that I had no work, likely because HE was employed. That
traitorous companies were in the process of selling out the US of A and
taking all the jobs overseas.

So he then asked me when I was to start my work again, and how
many days there after I would make a payment to his card
company. I then pointed out that I had no prospect of work as the
industry that I had been in, software for telcos which allows firms
like his in m'umbai to pretend they are in kansas, had been
exported to India and China. So I replied that I did not know when I would
get a job as software was not coming back to America as an industry. Then
the bastard from m'umbai turned ugly. He insisted that I could move to
other countries for work. Like INDIA? I ask? It went downhill from there.
Insults, and abuse from the bastard in m'umbai...telling me to abandon my
family responsibilities and relocate to asia. To get off my big american
ass and think more realistically.

of course I immediately adopted a thick Indian accent and gave it
right back as good as I got or better. Fluck the bastard from
M'umbai and the avatar he rode in on, AND the company that he
represents, Fleet Bank/Credit Card Co. I ended by suggesting that
likely I would next get a job with a credit card collection company
and be calling him around dinner to see if I could not add to the
heat of the curry in his stomach.

Now, the kicker for the whole thing? Well, the call back numbers,
all of them are so loaded with calls I could not sit there waiting
hours to complain. I tried all the customer service numbers and the
collection numbers and even his call number which the operator
tells me is a referral number from the US.

But the real sweetness to the whole situation is that Fleet has sent me
two packs of checks recently FOR THIS ACCOUNT! I am tempted to use their
own checks to pay off (transfer) the balance back to itself to see what
the hell happens. How will the next Indian collection agent to call know
if the checks are on his own company? And if I use them by December I get
3.9% apr which has got to be better than the 28% they are charging now.

Now how is that for dinner aggravation? I could tell he really knew he
blew it by owning up to being in India. Why, do you suppose, the company
tells them to lie about where they are?

What a truly bizarre state of affairs.

***********************
I hope this passes the rule sniff test. Not too much profanity but I really am pissed.

[Booberdawg]

1. "Fluck the bastard from M'umbai and the avatar he rode in on" LOL!

That part was funny :D

You didn't break any rules but this thread probably belongs in the Lounge. I alerted for you.

Sorry about your unemployment situation. I'm unemployed from software industry too for 10 months now.

[junker]

6. Say Booberdawg

that appellation come from 'bouver' dog? eh, bouvier?

[Booberdawg]

8. LOL! No, My dog's name is Boober ... dawg .. get it?

:D

Mais, Je parle un peu de francais

[LittleApple81]

2. Good rant.

I don't know if the poor guy is at fault...
But at least you got it off your chest.
I am worried about this job situation. And it ain't going to get better.

[SharonAnn]

3. Why, do you suppose, the company tells them to lie ?

Well, probably because it upsets people who find out that the person they're talking to is in India and has an American job that has been moved offshore.

That's probably why.

It sucks, and I don't think it's going to get any better.

I interviewed for a job recently that I thought I was going to get but the company filled it with an L-1 candidate from their India office. Found out later that this person hadn't been an employee for more than a week before he was "selected" for this job. And this was a high-paying IT Technical Project Mgt. job.

Sigh, don't know when/where I can find a job either. Fortunately, my husband has some income and we're trying to get by doing some part-time technical things.

Things are just so different form 3 years ago, I can hardly believe how it used to be, BB (Before Bush).

[BQueen]

4. I've been wondering about those accents...

My car finance company seems to have done the same thing. I cannot understand most of the people in the finance or collections department anymore, yet they get insulted if I ask them to repeat things.

I feel your pain, junker, collection calls are the worst. And how well trained are these folks in Fair Debt Collection practices? And how much does Fleet Bank care anyway? It would be nice to bust one of them big time both for exporting the collection jobs and for engaging in negligent (lack of) training regarding legal collection practices in the process.

Hope your prospects improve soon...btw - my level of profanity over that call would have been worse, so you pass my sniff test.

[junker]

5. Thanks for the encouragement..,

the real problem has to do with the situation with a primary family member who is terminal. I will not 'abandon' my terminal relative to move to some other country (it took me long enough to get back home to PNW - army brat and internat consultant for software companies for decade)....and now to move to india? I think not. Also ironic is that I worked on much of the SS7 code that allows the billing and rating channel of the telco system to accomodate the referrals we use today. Hoisted by my own code.

Plus I don't speak hindi.

And their code was always worst case first. Not optimal. Oh well what the hell, eh?

What goes around comes around. So let us see. Top 1 per centile of population owns most of the companies and is doing most of the job exporting and that top 1 per cent is 95 % republican....naw couldn't be... as that would imply that when the jobs riots begin in ernest next year that the banksters strung up in the streets will be mostly republican....well, I guess that one does figure.

Can anyone say Namaste? repeat after me... namaste, dude.

[Nexus7]

7. Strawman

Jobs have been exported for 30 years now. First the manufacturing jobs went, ever notice where your computer parts are made, where the shower curtain, stereo receiver, automobile...? I guess you didn't notice it since you don't work in that industry? So for a very long time, the service industry has been propping up the economy. Then the repub education cutbacks kick in, and every other nation (except Afghanistan and the Republic of New Guinea) has more employable people in every service category. What do you think is going to happen? A company is going to spend money on every college grad/programmer/phone support person/etc in this country where no one is sure where the incentive is going to come for the economy to recover given that 3 tax cuts have done the opposite, and flyboy is out of ideas; or are they going to save a dime and export the job? But hey, take it out on the dude in India if it makes you sleep better knowing you gave the repubs one more pass. Hell, there's an immigrant on the street right now, why don't you go give him a piece of your mind? Pat Buchanan and Ralphie Nader have the same idea too, vote for them while you're at it. Genius.

[junker]

11. I worked forestry, and gleaning, and carpentry and put myself

through school. And had not voted repub and had taught my ass to program to the point where I have patents and shit, and MS who I worked for has patents from my ideas. SO I do have the right to take it out on the dude in india NOT because he is in india, but because he tells me to suck it up, leaving my dying brother to his own fate, and move to somewhere where I can work for starvation wages. Well fluck that dude. I stand and fight and die here. I like it here. I don't give a rats'ass about the international monetary situation or some dickhead in the other washington trying to tell me how to live. I gave this dickhead a problem in a hindoo accent CAUSE he was an insulting dickhead with no vision NOT CAUSE he was hindoo.

I want every machinist throughout the world to make the same money for the labor of creating tools. If they are all paid the same rate for making machine tools, then we can stabilize the coming global gold standard about those wages and establish global parity of poverty.

If you aint poor now, you soon will be when the banking system tanks.

[newyawker99]

13. Hi Nexus7!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[chookie]

9. Here's how to get revenge

Get a job driving a taxi, or running a convenience store, and shut him out of the employment scene in the USA.

Your story was poignant. I wonder how many times a day this little drama plays out across our country - when those who had been prosperous by working hard in their jobs, who now find themselves being harassed on the phone for not being able to pay their bills by the poor slobs who are outsourcing for American corporations who exported American jobs overseas?

Collection agents are supposed to be real assholes, but for this guy, in the employ of some traitorous US firm who is too fucking cheap to pay Americans a living wage, to start preaching to you and attempting to shame you in this manner is too much. Sanctimonious little prick! Well, maybe the Pigs at the top want workers to hate other workers, so we'll all be vulnerable and easy for them to control.

Have you been following any of the recent developments regarding Indian immigration? There have been drastic cutbacks in how many Indians with valuable skills can enter this country. There is also a proposal to bring the same talented and skilled people over as "guest workers" -- which means that they do not have to abide by the employment laws of the US -- and thus treat Indian professionals as coolies, rather than paying them as valued American workers. And of course, with communications as they are, they can keep them in India and pay them less than a tenth of what they would have to pay them here. We get screwed, they get exploited, and the pigs at the top grant themselves extravagant million dollar bonuses for cutting operating costs, and then Bush goes on television and makes a speech in which he crows about how American corporations have become more productive.

Imagine having the whole planet as your plantation! That's what these guys want.

What they will eventually do is destroy capitalism. And certainly, as the middle class diminishes in the US, democracy is eroded.

[Nexus7]

10. A little bigotry goes a long way

Hmmm.. let's see, the economy does better when
a. A skilled professional is brought in and he/she contributes to the economy
b. The job is exported.

I know you want
c. Someone from the American Education System gets the job

but that ain't going to happen, because the economic climate is too risky to pay the kind of wage that the salary surveys show.

But hey, let's do the racial slurs and let the repubs off the hook for screwing the economy. Nice move.

[BQueen]

12. Yo! chill out!

junker did not appear to me to be "taking it out" on the Indian guy - sounds like the collection agent was doing the usual crap by implying that he had no intention of paying for the goods when he bought them. How would YOU like being called a thief? That is what it amounts to...

and you completely mischaracterize the post this allegedly responds to, which refers to Indian workers with valued skills either being imported into this country in such a way as to avoid paying them what they are worth or paying them insignificant wages to do the dirty work over there. In no way is that a racial slur.

You're new to DU, so, a word of advice -- READ CAREFULLY BEFORE FLAMING SOMEONE.