Communication: Intermediate 1

Outcome 1 Reading Call Waiting. D Fitzpatrick.


Today I read an article called Call Waiting, written by Fin Macrae, a photojournalist for a national photography magazine, here in the United Kingdom. This article accompanies a series of his related photographs.
It's an entertaining piece of journalism, where he illustrates what the day to day activities of a photographer actually entail. No it's not all supermodel's, jet setting and rock stars, somewhere along the line the mundane tasks of running an office must take precedence, this is how the article begins, with Finn stuck beneath a mountain of paperwork and menial task's like ordering oil for the central heating of his studio. While carrying out these tedious task's, he is incessantly desturbed by cold callers looking to interest him in whatever it is they are so rudely selling, I can appreciate the scenario, it's happened to me countless times and normally I would get angry with whoever the faceless corporate automaton is on the end of the line, and gleefully fire of a verbal salvo of invective scorn in their ear, but it's not all about fun
this is where Fin has something to teach me about people and life, you see during the course of the day his curiosity was to take him down a new avenue of thought. A gentleman named Peter called him from Delhi to discuss mobile phone contracts, Fin was not in the least bit interested however after he had placed the phone down on the receiver, possibly for the first time ever, he became curious as to who it actually was, on the end of the telephone line. Are they merely heavily accented minor demons, floating about the telephone wires, waiting to disrupt your serenity, at the most inopportune moment, or are they in fact people, that's right humans just like most of you, and most certainly me, who have their own drives, aspirations, hopes and dreams, not to mention the necessity of having to make a living in the real world.
With this new found empathy Fin delves into the hypostasis of the call center industry, he begins examining just where these people are located and finds that they hail from Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Fin contrasts this with the familiar locations and people from his home in the Highlands who provide the same service and have similar if not the same drives. Looking at an academic report provides him with a more detailed understanding of how the industry operates, and leads him to contact and eventually travel to the industry's trade union in Mumbai, where he was able to photograph a variety of these call centre employees, outside of the highly pressurized environment of the office.
Working in a call center is an extremely tough job, staff turnover at the moment in India, runs at a shocking 80% ! every year ! and the reason for this seems to be linked to the nature of the task itself, for example it's incredibly repetitive and the pay is not all that rewarding, if you factor in poor statistical based management and shabby working conditions, then I would certainly count myself among those stampeding former employees, racing for the exit sign, onto the street and the next low skill, high turnover, McJob. The transient nature of the 21st century service slaves, driven by debt and design.
On a lighter note, what Fin's cultural study of the call center workers in India and our own here in Scotland show, is that Universally we are all just people doing our best, we all share more similarity's than differences and we are all, and I include Fin, in complete agreement on two things, firstly let's cut each other some slack while we work, and the other is, Paperwork is a bitch :-)

They tried to ban this http://gawker.com/5002269/the-cruise...