@FaheemMitha I don't mind Indian English. It's Indian non-English that isn't so much fun.

From this no good can come.

It already hasn't.

@Faheem: Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for the Indians I know and work with. But communication in English has not appeared to be their strong suit, on average. And I'm not the only one who has noticed this. Some individuals speak excellent English: Salman Rushdie, for example. And a few of the folks I've worked with, and met online. But many, many have execrable English.

Saw that.

As is true of Americans too, truth be told.

Only one in a thousand speakers of English from India are native speakers.

But you're going down the Taiwan rathole.

Yeah, I know.

I feel bad in a way, but I feel worse when I have to play the Skype version of "telephone" with a bunch of coworkers who aren't up to what I consider to be an adequate level of communication skills.

Had that at the previous job.

The current one is all native speakers of either English or French or Spanish.

Well, or Scots. :)

Scots I can understand.

Also Irish.

Irish English is easier than some Scots English can be.

We do seem to have a lot of people from the Isles working for us.

But I know only too well of the pain you refer to.

Perhaps I didn't bitch as much about it here as I felt.

Yesterday our new Edinburgher gave a presentation for the whole dev team (fifty-odd) via Google Hangouts. Him it was easy to understand.

Wait not GH.

GotoMeeting.

Not 50 heads at the bottom.

Just audio plus his presentation.

And they have the same southern accent.

And are both in the middle-aged bracket.

They get each other's mail and birthday greetings all the time. :)

At least with GTM you can see who's talking. You can't on a phone freeforall.

"Southern accent" meaning southern England.

That's true.

I just could never follow the VZ phone fusterclux with all the Hindians talking at once.

And it hurt my head to try.

What makes it worse is that they didn't seem to think anything problematic with everybody talking at once.

Right?

Please close this before it draws any more flies.

I do feel for the feller but it's not a good question.

Done.

I had to ignore about 11,000 music tracks to fit the remainder (4,225) onto my car iPod. That sucks.

Can’t believe that Comic-Con's Game of Thrones panel is Yahoo’s #5 top ‘story’ right now.

Off for Chinese.