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Hans up
At Backbytes we are very much against the ridiculous racial tokenism that means that when we talk to an Indian call centre, the person at the other end is obliged to use an obviously fake English name.
So we are delighted to find out that when we called Dell’s technical support last week, the man we were speaking to with the strong Indian accent did not affect an English name. We were, he announced, speaking with ‘Hans’.
Hans, pronounced not very differently from the German word, is the Sanskrit word for "goose" (although the influence of the derogatory implication in English leads it to usually be translated "swan").
This is incidentally an ancient Indo-European word with cognates in most major IE branches. Latin "anser" means goose. Did your call centre agent seem particularly silly?
Posted by :Rohan | January 3, 2007 2:25 PM