My job's gone, shuold I become a male hooker?

Working in a call centre have you ever faced a boorish overseas client who often refuses to talk to an Indian rep and asks for someone of their skin colour?

Undoubtedly racist. But what is it that is turning the confident American into a vociferous bigot who is ready to proclaim America first?

Think of the man you are replacing. He is most likely an all-American man with a college degree. He has already taken about $30,000 in student loans and are yet to pay it off. He joins a big IT company where he is working 13 hours every day to keep on top of the latest developments in his field. One day he goes to work as usual and one chilly morning is told by his supervisor that he is not required any more. The company has outsourced his as well as his colleague's work to Bangalore in India, where the Indian techie will do his stuff at one-tenth the salary.

Full article at..
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/490647.cms

Now NASDAQ Live from Bangalore

WASHINGTON: Reporting on the outsourcing issue may never be the same again. The news agency Reuters has announced that it will be hiring six reporters in Bangalore. No news here – except the reporters sitting in Bangalore will be covering American companies and financial markets.

The announcement has caused a stir in the news world. It's one thing to have India answer Britrail phone calls and troubleshoot for Dell, but what happens when journalists who report on the subject feel their own jobs are threatened?

Complete Story here...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/486354.cms

Met a friend this weekend...

I have a freind who was with me in school. He was with me in Bangalore for quite some time before he was transferred to Kerala. He keeps coming back to Bangalore over the weekends about once a month.

That bugger always does this thing. He'll call me (and a few others who are not on his priority list) only when one of the following events happen
1) He is in town on sat and sun and its sun 8:30 PM
2) He is in town and its 6 PM and he is to enter a movie theatre in the next 10 minutes
3) He is in town is about to board a bus back to Kerala

This time I cought him in time and met up with him in time to spend the evening with him and have dinner also.

How much have we worked?

In Microsoft Excel, my friend was doing an analysis of turn around time of the team on certain user-reported issues. He wanted to find out how many 'woring' days it took him the team to get back on individual issues reported by the customer, given that he has the starting and ending dte of all issues.

I searched the Microsoft Excel help (excellent help provided by M$, that's why it is M$) and found the formula NETWORKINGDAYS(). It acceps the starting and the ending days, and automatically removes th saturdays and sundays in the period between them. If you have a list of other holidays (not falling on saturdays or sundays, of course), you can supply those dates (or the range of cells containing these holidays) as the third parameter.

The only thing to note is that the Analysis Tool Pack needs to be activated. This tool pack provides functions and interfaces for financial and scientific data analysis. Go to Tools->Add ins... and select Analysis Tool Pack.

Tall Europeans...

My theory is that the evolution trend followed in Europe was very different than that happened elsewhere, especially in India. I had seen this in a series on National Geographic. Homo Sapiens started evolving in Africa, and then a few of them started walking. One branch went to Europe and there were other branches that went elsewhere (middle-east, russia, americas, etc etc).

I don't remember exactly why, but there were reasons why they grew taller than the others in central Asia. Onece I get the URL of that program, I'll update this post with it.

Ok, here is the URL
http://www.nationalgeographic.co.in/jom/jom.asp