Ugly Americans
Dear D,
You never realise (even after reading Lederer and Burdick) just how ugly Americans can be until you leave America for a few years. A few months won't do it. You actually have to bond with the new place, see it through local eyes before the scales fall from your eyes.
I work for a medium sized company in NZ. We were so good at beating out our American competition in our field that they bought us. Don't blame us, blame the shortsighted Kiwi bloke who sold out for big $$. That being the situtation, means that now, our head office is thousands of miles away. Now, in America, if you're in say, California, and the head office is in Phoenix, that's no big deal. Everyone treats each other like collegues and even though there may be some bitching in the branches about high-handedness, it's nothing like what happens when a US company buys a company in another country.
Honest to Dobbs, I think these guys back in the States have a mental picture of us running around barefooted in grass skirts and coconut bras...or maybe they think all of us have moku and a human flesh sandwich in our lunchbag. Whatever it is, it pisses me off. Stop with the condescention mutherfuckers, it's not pretty. I've spent the last week to and fro-ing with one of the most arrogant assholes I've had to deal with in a long time. He's about to get his comeuppance again.
The first time was earlier in the week when he wrote me another nasty e-mail demanding something that he claimed to have ordered from us, but which I know wasn't. See...I'm in charge of that area as well as the sending out of quotations, and the signing and control of all our contracts. So, when this guy starts bitching to me about a quote being too high, and demanding parts as of yesterday. I grabbed him by the short hairs and shook. He pulled that antique crapola about "What is the price in US dollars, we don't pay in NZ dollars..." I said, "Per the directive of ________(CEO) you DO pay in NZ dollars." What I should have added was, "Don't they give you idiots calculators so that you can figure out an exchange rate? Hell, we do it all the time here, with about ten different rates." The thing is, he wasn't being stupid, he was being ethnocentric...he never even thought of figuring out the exchange rate on his own, because in his mind, any currency aside from US currency is not really money. That's where the ugly lies.
Now, I'm about to get ugly. This guy is supposed to be a "senior technical purchaser" but didn't even realise that he'd confused three different parts. He's probably never even seen the product that they are a part of . Unfortunately for him, he thought he wanted a part that was going to cost US$7. ea., but now that we know what he really wants, he's going to discover, that what he really needs is going to cost him around US$84. ea. I can almost feel his pain from here...but not quite.
So, here I sit, a savage native, typing away at 100 wpm between drags on my fine Cuban cigar (totally legal here) in my architecturally designed home, meters away from the South Pacific Ocean that surrounds my wee island. I'm so angry that I may be forced to visit the local village, and have one of our native beverages; cappucino, or maybe I'll just fire up the smoke signal device on my cellphone and have them delivered.
You never realise (even after reading Lederer and Burdick) just how ugly Americans can be until you leave America for a few years. A few months won't do it. You actually have to bond with the new place, see it through local eyes before the scales fall from your eyes.
I work for a medium sized company in NZ. We were so good at beating out our American competition in our field that they bought us. Don't blame us, blame the shortsighted Kiwi bloke who sold out for big $$. That being the situtation, means that now, our head office is thousands of miles away. Now, in America, if you're in say, California, and the head office is in Phoenix, that's no big deal. Everyone treats each other like collegues and even though there may be some bitching in the branches about high-handedness, it's nothing like what happens when a US company buys a company in another country.
Honest to Dobbs, I think these guys back in the States have a mental picture of us running around barefooted in grass skirts and coconut bras...or maybe they think all of us have moku and a human flesh sandwich in our lunchbag. Whatever it is, it pisses me off. Stop with the condescention mutherfuckers, it's not pretty. I've spent the last week to and fro-ing with one of the most arrogant assholes I've had to deal with in a long time. He's about to get his comeuppance again.
The first time was earlier in the week when he wrote me another nasty e-mail demanding something that he claimed to have ordered from us, but which I know wasn't. See...I'm in charge of that area as well as the sending out of quotations, and the signing and control of all our contracts. So, when this guy starts bitching to me about a quote being too high, and demanding parts as of yesterday. I grabbed him by the short hairs and shook. He pulled that antique crapola about "What is the price in US dollars, we don't pay in NZ dollars..." I said, "Per the directive of ________(CEO) you DO pay in NZ dollars." What I should have added was, "Don't they give you idiots calculators so that you can figure out an exchange rate? Hell, we do it all the time here, with about ten different rates." The thing is, he wasn't being stupid, he was being ethnocentric...he never even thought of figuring out the exchange rate on his own, because in his mind, any currency aside from US currency is not really money. That's where the ugly lies.
Now, I'm about to get ugly. This guy is supposed to be a "senior technical purchaser" but didn't even realise that he'd confused three different parts. He's probably never even seen the product that they are a part of . Unfortunately for him, he thought he wanted a part that was going to cost US$7. ea., but now that we know what he really wants, he's going to discover, that what he really needs is going to cost him around US$84. ea. I can almost feel his pain from here...but not quite.
So, here I sit, a savage native, typing away at 100 wpm between drags on my fine Cuban cigar (totally legal here) in my architecturally designed home, meters away from the South Pacific Ocean that surrounds my wee island. I'm so angry that I may be forced to visit the local village, and have one of our native beverages; cappucino, or maybe I'll just fire up the smoke signal device on my cellphone and have them delivered.
posted by Tarla @ 6:18 am
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