Saturday 30 November 2013

How to understand bad English of smart nerds

When people text, there is no trace of an accent

Following Stan's conference call with the Thai, Israeli, Scotch, Faroe Island and New Delhi office, CEO Stan complained that he understood 3% of what our nerds said.

Stan bellowed at me. "No one in the fuc-ing global company can speak proper global English. That call was a waste of my time, Gloria. You have a huge training budget. What do you do with it, girl? Are you not my business partner? Fix it, Gloria. I want people to speak the Queens' English".

As a global HR business partner in a global firm, I need to deal with core values; "wow communication" is one of our core values. This, I plan to  purchase Internet of Things-based  "accent-cancellation" software to improve our understanding of what is said on con calls. 

The only problem is that we need to configure into the software a core global accent into which all communication will be transformed, and this is controversial.

Comrade Carl Mark, the chief geek who heads the IoT and big data department, wants the core accent to be English with a Russian accent. That makes no sense to me, from an HR perspective. 

Hugh White from Global Diversity wants the core accent to be Global American English, with a "tinge" of all global accents, which shows me how stupid and impractical Hugh White can be at times. (Hugh is a Caucasian and straight.)

I have made my choice, and the core accent will a Scotch accent, from Glasgow. 

My father, the late Pierre Elliot Ramsbottom, would have jokingly suggested that we use Yingluck Shinawatra's accent  as the core accent, in order to establish a base line. Pop would also tell me to use the word "global" more sparingly.



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