Thursday, January 10, 2008

Outsourcing the Day to Day Stressors of Life

Here's some insight regarding life on the other side of those monuments to outsourcing, Indian call centers. It seems that operators in India are succumbing to the stress of dealing with European and American ire:
Miss Aggarwal, an English graduate, said she planned to quit, tired of wishing customers a good morning only to hear: "Oh, I'm through to India am I? Put me through to someone who can understand English, you f****** cow."
Yikes. These people are apparently suffering from various medical problems real and imagined from this sort of work.

I'm reminded of a patient I saw in my office many years ago, a young woman with a "positive review of systems" which is medicalese for having every complaint under the sun. After getting a detailed medical history and examining her thoroughly finding nothing wrong, I asked her if anything in her personal life was bothering her.

"Well gee doc, I hate my job. It's kind of...you know, stressful."

I asked her what she did (which I should have done in the first place). Her answer convinced me that she did in fact have one of the worst, most stressful jobs in the history of mankind.

She worked as a cashier at an impound garage. She had to take rather large payments from less than cheerful "clients" to retrieve their cars which had been towed. My advice: find another line of work.

Who says medicine has to be complex and arcane?

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