Two great speeches were delivered recently at Harvard graduation. One by Bill Clinton and one by Bill Gates.
One line, in Gates’ speech was moving: in a letter from his mother to Melinda Gates his mother said “from those to whom much is given, much is expected.” Both speeches asked the graduates to think about the world at large, the inequalities and those less fortunate. The ask of the students to use their privileged position to improve the human condition.

I highly encourage reading both of these in full.

I’m taking two courses in philosophy these days. I spend the first half trying to understand ontological arguments, and the second half getting visible thrills out of its rebuttal. I’m using my last few weeks here to seriously contemplate about “stuff,” hence my less postings on the blog.

The posts will resume soon.

My conversation with customer support at Chase Bank.

Adnan: Hey, $1000 seemed to have disappeared from my account. Can you please help me figure it out?

Jim (Heavy Indian accent): Mye name is Jim. You has wrong pin, we unable to verify. Sorry. Thank you. Aaaa… Aaaa.

Adnan: Jim, kiya haal hain aap kay?

Jim: (silence)

Adnan: So, what’s up with the $1000?

Jim: I, um, I has to find out. You are insecure, you have to secure by enter PIN.

After 5 minutes of very bad grammar

Adnan (Moderately agitated): So you’re saying it will take 60 days to get money which is mine? Are you serious?

Jim: (Stuttering, stammering, incompetence and more bad grammar)

Adnan: What’s your real name? Where are you located Jim?

Jim: Due to, um, security reason, it is policy not to disclose location.

Adnan: Can I speak with your manager?

After a 10 minute wait, I hung up. There was a 4-letter expletive somewhere, uttered to random static. It’s almost ironic, being South Asian, that an offshored call center managed to piss me off. I can now imagine why so many Americans are so miserably upset with the terrible customer service some Indian call centers are offering.

I think the operations people who make a business case for offshoring call centers to the cheapest possible service providers need to understand a thing or two about marketing. It takes one click to switch accounts, and I refuse to put up with petty cost cutting when I can go down the road to another provider who takes my business seriously. By the way, I later called Wachovia and spoke with a US-based customer service agent. The conversation didn’t appear scripted, and he fixed my problem in 3 minutes.

Would I pay a premium for service? Any day of the week.

10. “Our projections are conservative.”

9. “Gartner says our market will be $50 billion by 2005.”

8. “Boeing will sign our contract next week.”

7. “Key employees will join us as soon as we get funded.”

6. “No one else is doing what we do.”

5. “Several firms are doing due diligence.”

4. “Oracle is too slow to be a threat.”

3. “Beta sites will pay to test our software.”

2. “Patents make our business defensible.”

1. “All we have to do is get 1% of the market.”

Source: Garage Ventures