The Other Side of the World

I've been at my new company for a little over a month now.  One of the interesting aspects of this job is my newfound participation in globalization.

I grew up in small-town Iowa, where globalization was about the farthest thing imaginable from our lives.  The world news on television was about thirty seconds long, and always involved shooting or bombing in some desert-covered country.

One of the reasons I was attracted to New Company is that over half of the company is in India.  This is not off-shoring like Old Company did - in a way, the business and executive side is sort of off-shored, since the majority of the workers are abroad.  I like to explain it that way, anyway, because I've noticed a few jaws drop at the concept.  There is sort of a negative connotation to offshoring in general, it seems.

So every morning, or at least it has been that way for the past two weeks, I haul my sleepy self over to my laptop around 7:30, and, as the little angel blissfully babbles to Baby Einstein, I chat with a graphic designer and/or developer in India.  It is around 6 p.m. there at that time.  They seem to stay at work much later than we do in the U.S., or maybe it's just them in particular.  I have chatted as late as 11:45 a.m. here and found them still pleasant at that hour.  That sort of blows my mind - I would be really grumpy if some Indian person was trying to talk to me about software development at 10 p.m. 

One of the funniest things about chatting with the graphic designer is that he uses all that hip-to-the-schiznit sort of IM shorthand that I don't know. It makes me feel very unhip that someone who already knows three languages to my one is jazzing up English to the point where I can't read it anymore.  How uncool are we in America that we only know one language?  Why WHY don't we insist kids learn two from preschool?  Maybe I will force another language upon the little angel.  K. (the graphic designer) says his life necessitates the knowledge of multiple languages, because they are all used regularly.  I think that's our problem - we don't do anything we don't  have to do, and we don't have to know anything other than English in the U.S.  Interesting.

For now, I feel gr8 that I am at least becoming rteously modern. UR turn!