Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Ingliss no spoke here

Why is it that in a country with so many different nationalities living in it, so many tourists and business visitors, where English is the language we use to communicate with each other, that so many front-line staff don’t speak the language?

It isn’t their fault, and I’m not criticising them in any way. What I don’t follow is the thought process of the person who hired them. They have customers willing, wanting even, to give them money, who’ve taken the trouble to visit their establishment. But they can’t spend the money because they can’t communicate with the ‘sales’ staff.

What a strange way to run a business.

1 comment:

secretdubai said...

=they are way cheaper than people who can speak English

What I find breathtaking is the fact that 75% of the population here is from the subcontinent, with the majority nationality Pakistani and Indian, and they didn't think until half way through the census that it might be helpful to use more languages than English and Arabic.

Sure they can do what they want here, if those are the official languages. But they were the ones wanting to collect data fully, accurately, quickly and easily, so it was to their benefit to hire Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi etc interviewers.