When I first came to the Arabian Gulf looking for work, I realised everyone I spoke to on the phone spoke English just like me.
“Who’s this?” asked the phone operator when I asked for the manager. This was the time before phone operators were trained to say, “Good morning, I am Puftish ( or some name that sounded like that) , howmayibeofassistance?” in a rapid-fire sentence.
“Who, me?” I asked , taken aback by the questioning and then told her my name, and before I could continue, she shot back, “What do you want?” Obviously this lady was trained in phone etiquette by an army sergeant I thought to myself, asking her if I could speak to the sales manager.
I am sure there was no such thing as an HR manager at that time, until companies realised that humans are resources too, much, much later, and separate departments were made to herd in the human resources.
The person doing the hiring at that time was either the marketing manager or the sales manager, as this person went out of the office a lot and met many people, so he was thought to be competent to do the hiring.
“The sales manager went on vacation today only,” she replied. I thought about what she said, and then told her, “Great, can I get an appointment with him tomorrow, then?” She lost her patience with me. “What am I telling you?” she told me in a glacial voice, fed up with a silly job hunter who did not understand English. “He has gone on vacation today only.”
When I finally tracked him down after two weeks, he asked me to come on over to the office, that was in the busy downtown area. “Do you drive?” he asked me. When I said yes, he told me that I could park at the company’s entrance in the ‘backside’.
As the years passed a new breed of polite phone operators came to this region from India. The moment she picked up the phone, she would ask, “What is your good name?”
I am originally from the gentler part of India in the South, but even I am never that polite and it always threw me into a loop when someone asked me that. The “good name” bit comes from the translation of shubh naam in Hindi, where the name of a person is always good, auspicious, happy or bright. I would immediately start thinking of my parents peering into a book of babies’ names and asking each other, “Do you think that’s a good name for him?” pointing at a name which meant an extremely rich soul and a person of very high station in life.
Too many foreigners
As a large section of the expatriate population was from the sub-continent, I knew immediately I was entering an Indian eatery when the signboard at the entrance proudly proclaimed, “Snow White Restaurant”, or when I went for my haircut to the barber with the signboard, “My Fair Lady Saloon”. One manager of a company I spoke to for a job, said, “There are too many foreigners here.”
“Who could he be talking about?” I wondered. “Maybe this is what happens to people who work in a foreign country for very long.” Then I realised he was talking about the British managers.
I am from Hyderabad and we speak in a funny Urdu accent, and everyone else across the country thinks our sentence structure is amazingly silly. Once when we held a party it started to rain and it was for the first time I saw rain in the desert.
I quickly translated in my head and shouted, “It’s raining outside,” and a dour Scotsman in our group said, “Thank God for that” and winked. We all laughed, though nobody understood what he meant.
