BPO staffers find US shows funny
Gurgaon, Oct. 25: The laughter was coming as fast as the stereotypes. When a buffoonish American on the NBC show Outsourced warned his colleague not to eat the food in the Indian cafeteria or he would be on the toilet for five days, the roomful of workers watching the show in this outsourcing boomtown south of New Delhi erupted in guffaws.
“Indians are very proud of their spicy food and their robust digestion tracts,” one software specialist explained later.
The show’s explanation of the Indian head bobble, an indeterminate sideways nodding gesture that can mean yes or no, prompted chuckles. And the sight of a silent, slightly menacing Sikh character who kept storming offscreen drew more laughter, as well as comparisons to a co-worker, Angad, who was also watching the show.
He “never sits in his seat, so there is a lot in common,” explained a manager named Nitin S.
“Outsourced,” NBC’s new Thursday night sitcom, is about a Kansas City novelty company that moves most of its jobs to India and sends an American manager to run things. To see how the show compared to real life, The New York Times took two episodes to an India office of UnitedLex, a company based outside Kansas City, with most of its employees in India, and asked them to review it.
UnitedLex agreed to participate if employees’ last names were not used, to prevent rival companies from poaching them.
More than a dozen workers crammed into a state-of-the-art conference room this month at UnitedLex’s office here to watch the show, which is not broadcast in India. They viewed it on a projection screen normally used to videoconference with clients around the world. It did not seem like a great recipe for bridging cultural divides.
While UnitedLex and the fictional company share a Kansas headquarters, the similarities end there. UnitedLex does not take orders for T-shirts and fake vomit; it does legal work like intellectual property research and due diligence for some of the world’s largest companies and law firms.
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