Out on the Town

Well, eCS here in Bangalore is officially going live tonight, in about an hour. Last week was interesting, joining the newbies for their last week of training was fun, but now we'll see how well we do with each rep working their own pieces instead of the group exercises. I'm sure I'll have plenty to talk about after a few days of real work, but forget it for now. These are the last minutes of the weekend, so I'm not going to write about work.

Last week and over the weekend, Vikram (the eCS trainer here) took us out shopping and looking around the city a little. Picture your favorite mall on the day after Thanksgiving. Now put that outside and add in some of those guys from the RenFest walking around selling stuff on the sidewalk. And of course since the storefronts are out on the street instead of a mall, you and everyone else in the crowd is shoulder to shoulder with cars and motorcycles. (If cars had shoulders... well, you get the point.) Also, there's no set price in most of the stores. You haggle over EVERYTHING. Can you imagine going into Wal-Mart and arguing with the cashier over whether he should knock a couple of dollars off the t-shirts because you're buying more than one?

Speaking of the markets, farming out customer service here is really missing the larger opportunity: We need to recruit telemarketters from Bangalore! Almost every store I was in, as soon as I looked at one little carving or shawl or whatever, they had everything remotely similiar off the shelf, on the counter, and were extolling the virtues of the product. Amazing salespeople, but then I suppose that's natural when you pack a hundred stores in three or four blocks. Competition is amazing for your persuasive skills.

Saturday night we went to a downtown metal bar and then a rave at the edge of town. Well, sort of a rave, it was sponsored by Smirnoff and was at a place that looked like the courtyard of a nice hotel or something, but I think it was just there to throw big parties at. The dancing was fun and the DJ was, well hilariously cheesy. A lot of the mens' fashion in India seems pulled from the 70's and he was dancing up on the stage. I'm not sure I can do his dance justice with words, but I'll just say it included the cabbage patch.

There's a lot of music here that's a fusion of traditional indian music with american hip-hop or rock. The hotel gets about 20 different music video stations, and I'm going to try to get DVDs of some of these videos. There's one in particular that JC just HAS to see. (No, there aren't clowns. You just have to see it to believe it.)

Well, I have to run now. One last thing for my eCS peeps: I heard about what happened after the Danny Glover interview on Friday. Lemme guess: highest productivity night in a long time, right?