America the Baffled: One in Four Americans...

[Trip]

You are Tommy, not Tom. Calling you Tom would be weird.

[Particle Man]

Originally Posted by tommymac

WTF did I do to get dragged into this

All that nasty cooter talk

[tommymac]

Originally Posted by Trip

You are Tommy, not Tom. Calling you Tom would be weird.

ok that works, carry on

[racedoll]

Originally Posted by Trip

That's where the blue collar guys come in. The blue collar guys like vendors should know the language they sell the product to and be able to do customer support in that language. The maintenance guys are the grunts. It would be a waste of resources to language train them.

And they do, but sometimes it would make things easier if our guys knew their language.

[Cutty72]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

I could see learning Spanish just because there are so many Spanish-speaking people here, but what other nationality has a big enough presence here, that would give you the opportunity to USE what you learned every day? Because if you don't, you lose it, so what was the point of learning it?

In this area, Serbian or Albanian. We are getting a large influx of them, and Bosnian's (that I believe speak a variation of the above two) in this area.

Originally Posted by Trip

That's where the blue collar guys come in. The blue collar guys like vendors should know the language they sell the product to and be able to do customer support in that language. The maintenance guys are the grunts. It would be a waste of resources to language train them.

So then you have vendor on phone talking to customer support, relaying info back to the maintenance guy in english. Yeah, I see that failing terribly.

[Trip]

Originally Posted by Cutty72

So then you have vendor on phone talking to customer support, relaying info back to the maintenance guy in english. Yeah, I see that failing terribly.

The customer service person for large maintenance vendors is normally an engineer. They know the equipment quite well. I deal with a lot of foreign vendors in my line of work. They all speak english and they are all engineers.

[Cutty72]

Originally Posted by Trip

The customer service person for large maintenance vendors is normally an engineer. They know the equipment quite well. I deal with a lot of foreign vendors in my line of work. They all speak english and they are all engineers.

When was the last time you saw an engineer actually attempt a repair on something? No digging on you, but all the engineers I've worked with let the "grunts" fix it, cause they couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work.

[anthonyk]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

How does learning a language provide cultural awareness? Language is like math, there's no culture being gained.

Culture = learning how different people ACT, what their values are, their cooking, music, shit like that. Ain't gonna get that from a Rosetta Stone class.

The foreign-language classes I took in school (French and Spanish) had a pretty big cultural component to them. Yours didn't?

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by anthonyk

The foreign-language classes I took in school (French and Spanish) had a pretty big cultural component to them. Yours didn't?

You mean like having a food day? Yea we had that but it was rather weaksauce.

[Trip]

Originally Posted by Cutty72

When was the last time you saw an engineer actually attempt a repair on something? No digging on you, but all the engineers I've worked with let the "grunts" fix it, cause they couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work.

Some engineers are not allowed to work on things. It would cause all sorts of shit with unions. Especially in government positions. We are not allowed to turn a screwdriver or pretty much anything else where I work and its federal govt. Doesn't mean I don't know how shit works.

We brought in a vendor to qualify our craft on how to work on equipment and the class was taught by the vendor's engineers. They knew the equipment inside and out.