I got a sales call at work today from Chase Manhattan, pushing a Southwest Airlines Visa card, because apparently the fact that I’ve ignored their almost weekly solicitations by mail led them to believe that I was just waiting for them to call me.
Sales calls at work are annoying, and of course I told the guy who called to put me on their no-call list forthwith…but that’s not the story. The story is that the guy, who had a very heavy Indian accent—when he went into the disclaimer spiel about their no-call procedure, I couldn’t understand everything he was saying, and I’m good with accents—and was almost certainly calling from India, began the call by saying, “My name is Jack Anderson.”
Um…no. No, it isn’t.
Seriously, what is the purpose of having offshore telemarketers use “all-American” names? Am I supposed to like the guy better because he doesn’t have some skeery furrin name, and therefore sign right up for the credit card that he’s shilling? Do they think that by having these employees use familiar-sounding names, they’ll get customers to overlook the heavy accents and incomplete grasp of English and think, “Oh, that Chase Manhattan is such a great company, they don’t outsource their entry-level jobs to India”?
The thing is, I wouldn’t have even noticed the name if he’d used his real one; telemarketers usually give their names, and I ignore them just like I ignore the rest of the spiel. Instead, I ended up thinking how creepy and really quite offensive it was that Chase won’t let its offshore employees use their own names. I truly cannot imagine what they were thinking when they came up with this policy.
Unless the explanation is simply that they’re idiots. That, I’ll buy.