What does Rumba mean in Hindi?

It’s Friday.. joke time.

Last week, after spending some quality time mopping my office floor, I decided it was time to get some help. As hard as many of you feel I work, I am lazy in day-to-day life on the same order of magnitude. If you notice, those servers were shipped when I moved into this place a few months ago and the tree in the back still has a sales tag on it. I am afraid if I pull it the whole thing will fall apart and then I’d have to explain why my office has a dead orange tree.

So last week I got a Rumba. I fully expected this thing to simply blow all the crap around the office and make the dirt more distributed (and less noticeable) but I have to say that it has surpassed my every expectation. This little monster not only gets into everything and manages to finds its way out, it also sucks hair, dust and assorted crap right off the floors. Now, granted, its hardwood so not a big deal but I am still impressed. It has certainly eliminated many hours from the local assortment of illegal immigrants.

Which leads me to believe that we are being replaced by robots.

Which further leads me to believe that there aren’t billions of people in India, or even millions. I believe there are exactly 5,000 Indians on that subcontinent, all of whom rush into the street for the annual picture that makes it seem they live on top of each other with the collection of edible and homicidal animals.

But why? Why do that? What are they hiding?

And then it hit me.

Indians have already been replaced by robots. They are just trying to make us not go over there and see them living in their gold palaces while IVR responds to technical calls, support requests and customer service!

Here is my list of evidence:

1. Tech support Indians sound nothing like any of my Indian friends. They all speak in the same tone, with no inflection, no volume changes, no respect for any punctuation.
2. Tech support Indians do not respond to questions you ask but are answering the questions they believe you are asking.
3. Tech support Indians do not interact well with humans.
4. Tech support Indians either lack self awareness (“So, where are you at?”) or are unaware of their surroundings (“What time is it there? How’s the temperature?”)

Finally, I have developed an algorithm for checking if the Indian tech support is human or just a robot:

Step 1: Make up a word. See if they ask for a definition of the word or play along. “The computer is bizongling.” – Human will ask for a definition, robot will do a pattern match and proceed to answer a question.

Step 2: Stress test. Fire several questions in rapid succession. Human will try to respond to the most relevant question immediately. Robot will have a long pause.

Step 3: Full Duplex Check. Talk over the Indian tech support. Human will stop and get confused over why you’re such a bastard. Robot will continue to talk.

Step 4: Suicide check. Ask them to spell their name. Robot Indian Tech support names are Roger, Mike, Rod or Ted. Human Indian Tech support are either Patel or look like a Sunday newspaper put through a paper shredder and reassembled in random order. Ask them to spell their name. Third repeat into it you should hear a loud scream.

You don’t want to know how much time I have spent on tech support to become this cynical. I firmly believe that if I’m paying you and you’re not there to help me, you might as well be there to amuse me.