Hello this is Chad Chowdary, how may I help you?

Friday night, all of your friends are out partying either becuase they are plain lucky or because you just suck. No one home, TV just does'nt do it tonight. What do you do? I don't know what you'd do but this is what I'd do. Call any damn Customer Service after 9 EST and if your insurance provider, cellphone operator, plumber or the cleaning lady is smart enough, the call will be directed to a few continents away. Hamara India.

Time to pick on our call center friends.

If you get serviced by the right guy or girl, you got free entertainment. Keep some stock of popcorn, pop and pizza. How often can you call your family and friends paying 12.9 freaking cents per minute? (0r 6.9 cents per minute for one way conversations) Here you talk to someone in India not necessarily family, but hey! make friends dude!

Ok, I don't do that every Friday night, but I could. This post is dedicated to this guy who I am holding on right now and many others whose primary aim in life is to entertain me from thousands of miles away. As it happens, this is a genuine call to straighten some of my car insurance stuff, but waiting till 9 EST was quite some match-fixing effort.

Some of the salient entertainment features of this call: (This salient word was such a doh! every exam had it and I just hated it)

1. I was placed on hold the first time so he can do some "research" on my policy information. That research took a while, here I am chatting, thinking and fishing for million dollar ideas and getting more hungry, I only hope his research went on well and he got his PhD degree out of that.

2. He came back to me and asked me the same questions he did when I first called. I perfectly understand that he had to make sure I was not drunk since I last spoke to him, sober, could recite the alphabet, recide poems and capable of giving the same responses each time I was questioned under scary and extenuating circumstances.

3. It made no difference to him that I had a Honda Civic. He just kept referring to it as Honda City all along. I am sure that was premeditated to make me feel 'at home on Indian roads'. It made me feeling like I was honked at from all directions.

4. After one of those "can I put you on hold so I can discuss this policy with my superior" (the closest I could think of is supervisor) expeditions, he came back and said "I have good news, Sir"and reported that the policy amount actually went up. Since when did money become a bad thing? You can start to feel happy when they rip you off.

5. There was this one problem he could not help me out with. He says he will give me a call tomorrow to discuss the same and asks for my number and best time to reach me. While he was at it, I'd so much appreciate if he can conference call my mom. I'll try asking him tomorrow.

It used to surprise me why they use American names and fake accent while we have our Indian signature underlined and bolded in our accents. Nowadays you hear the Indian names itself, Chowdary talks to you instead of Chad, Navneeta instead of Nate. Quite a relief. Think about it, we learnt English from the British, we do business with Americans, but we invented our own Indian English and stuck to it. Pretty cool.

This post is meant to be taken in the lighter sense only, no harm meant to anyone. If you still feel you have been hurt, just get over it, truth hurts ;)