Hyperbole and all that, I realize, but having a 10 year old nephew I can assure you him and his friends know functionally the same amount of information about Encryption as most other non-techie adults. Which is to say, they understand that encryption typically means 2 way obfuscation, but not much else.
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More like luser-splained amirite?
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Who’s the guy behind him?
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I’ve made similar complaints and received similar garbage. I’m not sure that you weren’t being mansplained, but as is so often the case with these things, it can be hard to tell sometimes even when you’re on the receiving end of it. (Not a woman, I’m just comparing it to super-subtle interactions I’ve had that may or may not have been racist.) The other thing is that tone isn’t always conveyed well in text, so it could just be a lack of writing skill.
I would however, like to thank you for complaining about this. I’m increasingly unhappy with having to put in the equivalent of my Hotmail password in the eighth grade (cool-cold) for websites that request financial information. I’m happy with my credit union, but I really wish they had that feature that let’s you create one-time use CC numbers.
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Fair enough. I’ve met a couple geeky/smart-ass ten year-olds, which is probably skewing my estimation.
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That’s usersplaining. I do it all day long. And it’s so that people think I’ve actually said something important instead of just leaving the phoneline silent for 15 minutes while I work.
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Update: on Friday, I received a much shorter email from someone who apparently did read my feedback. In this case, I think shorter actually does mean something positive, as it wasn’t just a canned response:
Dear (My Name Here),
My name is Sarah, and I will be assisting you today. Thank you for contacting (Business) Customer Support.
I do apologize for the inconvenience. We understand your concern about the security of your file when registering or logging in and I will forward your feedback to the proper department.
Now honestly I don’t expect any change in their system settings, but at least I don’t feel vaguely insulted by this response. I’ll also note that I interacted with a “Sarah” in live chat when I had sizing questions and despite using a name that’s 99% of the time gendered male, our interaction was smooth, respectful, and useful. Maybe that’s a generic name customer service uses a lot or maybe it was the same person, who can say for sure?
I’m still undecided about cancelling my membership. I’m actually leaning towards doing it, but I’ll at least wait until I see the new clothes. The prices directly from their site aren’t any better than the exact same items on Amazon (same seller, in fact), but they do offer some small incentives for buying directly from them. (In this case, I got a free fleece poncho.) Still, I have to wonder: with this experience, is there really that much reason to not buy from Amazon? It’s certainly not like I’m deciding between Amazon and a local B&M store.
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I can’t cite it, but a lot of Customer Service work is done offshore by groups that have been specially trained to have American accents, and use generic Western Names® on the job. The click-and-dump-boilerplate email would fit such an operation, as would any chat-script (not a bot, a person operating a dialogue-tree).
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The Western Names® I can confirm, and they’re getting more clever. It used to be they’d use the most stereotypical Anglo names out there, but they’re diversifying into other non-Anglo ethnicities just as long as the names still sound “American”. Regardless, the accents are a dead giveaway. I don’t know why it matters what nationality they are, but if someone says their name is Neil Anderson but their accent sounds like they learned English last week from a Berlitz tape, I’d trust them a lot less than if they used their real name.
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Unfortunately a lot of Americans still have an innate distrust of anything even remotely “foreign.” Until this past June, I worked in the technology support office of a state college. Despite college’s image as a hot bed of liberalism and acceptance, we’d still get faculty and staff complaints that they couldn’t understand some of our help desk staff, specifically those that didn’t grow up in the US and had noticeable accents. Of course, on the other hand, there are plenty of people there that loved hearing some of these students talk, especially the one we had from New Zealand!
I tend to be somewhat interested in hearing where the people around me are from on a personal level. If I’m going to be hanging out with them, or interacting with them a lot, I like to hear their stories and about their lives, especially their views as someone who didn’t grow up here. I’ve had some wonderful experiences doing this, getting to know them, and sharing our lives. (Add to that, I’m not exactly a typical American!) However, for my interactions with customer service, I really don’t care about their nationality, as long as they can help me with my problem. They could be from Reno, Nevada, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, or Kandor, Krypton, as long as they can do their job well.
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Understood, I’m just kinda questioning the payoff matrix here. I don’t distrust anybody or anything foreign, so they could use their real name and I’d be fine. If they use an obvious fake name, then I immediately distrust them because they’re 1) lying about their identity and 2) playing me for stupid because that’s obviously not their name. If someone does distrust foreign people, they will especially distrust a foreign person they know to be lying to them. No good can come from this, and it’s probably demeaning to the call center workers as well.
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It’s not really about distrusting the person(who has very little power; is hewing closely to a script under conditions that would make Taylor smile warmly, and typically doesn’t seem atypically depraved); but about the message the company sends to you:
It’s hard to feel warm and fuzzy about an outfit that won’t pay enough to go for native-speaker support people; but also isn’t willing to be honest about the fact that they’ve shipped support to Hyderabad; and apparently has such a low opinion of your cluefulness that they think that ordering the poor bastard on the other end of the line to pretend that his name is “Bob” will fool you.
I don’t distrust poor “Bob” for following orders rather than giving me his real name; but exactly how good am I supposed to feel about whatever company is too cheap to hire the staff they think I want; cynical enough to force their actual staff to try to pander to me; and contemptuous enough of my competence to think that such a shoddy effort is going to work?
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If it’s a gut instinct, I will distrust whomever or whatever is causing me to feel distrust. Still, I know better than to blame low-level employees for an industry-wide practice, even though I know many other people will.
In my experience, techies can frequently condescend to non-technical people (I’m guilty of it as a techie :). Is the condescension in that message specifically because whomever wrote it is a man and he knows that most of the clientele are women and he condescended for that specific reason (“mansplaining”)? Or is it garden variety condescension that techies often show lay people? (“Techsplaining”?) I think you’d need to know who wrote it and what was going through their head to figure that out?
I once got a customer service rep who gave her name – a multi-syllable name from the Indian subcontinent – and immediately said “but you can call me ‘easy nickname based on her name’”. That to me is a perfect compromise: a lot of people in the U.S. are not going to feel comfortable trying to say a foreign name, so she offered something that was easy to pronounce, but she didn’t hide what her real name was.
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They don’t have to be native speakers but they need to be fluent enough that their non-native speech doesn’t create any barriers or issues in providing support.
I do agree that using fake, Anglo names feels weird. I can see why someone thought it might make the person on this end feel more comfortable with a name they can pronounce. But when the person has a thick accent and claims their name is “Barbara” or “Steven” you then start to wonder what ELSE is artifice in the conversation.
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Exactly. I don’t care where they’re from or what their real names are, but if they give an obvious fake name, it sets a tone of disingenuousness for the whole conversation.
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Totally a Band Name.
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And his backing band, the Red Pill Fedoras.
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