Saturday, January 1, 2011

India Ink

You can buy Indian hair online here.

I got spammed today, my first spam. Isn't it cute, that adorable, baby-waby cutie-patootie spam?
The message they left was fine. They liked a photo I took. Fine.
The messenger, however, was "dry erase clapboard," someone I had never heard of. Hmmm, I thought, and clicked on their name.
This is what came up: Hollywood Megastore, supposedly based in Hollywood, California.
But according to my Feedjit, Mr. Dry Erase was from Pune, Mahrashtra, India.
Boy, did I get pissy when I saw that.
Pune's not my favourite place at the moment and it's ironic that my first spam came from there.
Haven't they done enough? Do they have to spam me too?
The moral of this story is you really have to watch what you're ordering online. Hollywood Megastore claims to be based out of California, but the link on my page sends me to Pune.
Maybe the store is real and they pay a company in India to run their website. And maybe the person who left the message was just a bored employee in Pune surfing the internet for something to do. Maybe he really did like the picture.
What I'm thinking, though, is that employee is paid to travel online and leave links to the Megastore on everybody's blog. Which may not be illegal but it is immoral and kind of a pain in the ass.
Let me digress for just a moment.
Last night I saw a documentary on TV called Good Hair, in which comedian Chris Rock talked about what African American people have to go through in order to have straight hair. One of the things they do is buy weaves, really expensive weaves (generally they start at $1,000 U.S.) made of human hair. According to Chris, most of the hair for these weaves comes from India. The majority of it comes from temples where devout Hindus shave their heads. The people who have their heads shaved, by the way, have no idea that their hair is collected and sold to hairdressers in the U.S.
Rock also says there's a black market for stolen hair. Thieves break into homes and cut hair off the heads of sleeping women. They even sneak into movie theatres and cut off women's hair there. Seriously!
Not that I need a weave but you can bet I would never buy one now knowing that the hair on my head was stolen.
I mention this because lately it seems that EVERYTHING comes from India.
Today I looked around my house and was amazed at how much stuff came from India. My favourite tea towel. My son's jeans. My husband's shirt.
I don't think we realize that, the more crap we buy from places like India, the more we are putting Canadians out of work.
I don't make New Year's resolutions, but one of the things I will be more conscious of is buying domestic whenever I possibly can.
I really believe it's the best way to keep Canadians working.

8 comments:

  1. I'm totally down with this kind of cranky! Here's to a brand new year of excellent Cathy rants. ;-)

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  2. Saw Good Hair too.
    I'm with you on the out sourcing to India. The other day I got a call from a fellow calling himself Thomas Williams. The first Welshman I've heard with a thick Indian accent. I hate it when callers fake their identities or whereabouts. It must mean they aren't truthful about whatever it is they're selling.

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  3. Please take a moment to check out my documentary film BLACK HAIR..it examines the Korean Take-Over of the Black Beauty Industry...link to trailer
    http://www.blackhairdvd.com

    also I have posted the whole film on youtube
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p96aaTSdrAE

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great rant, and I am totally with you. It's not just services outsourced, but people; my BIL's computer programming job was outsourced to India and he spent a year without work.

    And a happy and righteous new year to you! peace...

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  5. Hey Cathy, how is you? I don't think this is an angry rant at all :-)

    I agree that the outsourcing is frustrating (to say the least), but I wonder why we get angry at the people in India rather than getting mad at the Canadian and US employers who decide this is a viable route. Canadian and US employers went searching for cost cutting measures and seemed to decide the human factor was negotiable.The job market here is really crazy, and it was eye-opening to see how many skilled people were out of work.
    Pixie in AZ.

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  6. I'm most surprised that this is your FIRST Spam! I didn't know that weave thieving was such big business but big business here was just high fiving about forcing the continuation of the Bush Tax cuts for the tippity top of the fat cat elite. The argument from fat cat central is that these tax cuts will result in the creation of jobs. What they did not mention is that all of those jobs would be over seas.

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  7. Spam is bad. Blog spam is even worse. And lookit you, all detectivey. Don't get me started on outsourcing. SO many of our clients complain that IT support jobs have gone to India. It creates chaos, let me tell you.

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  8. I'll swap you spam lists. I easily get more spams than real comments. I'll trade! I'll trade!

    You are in fact correct. It turns out CAPTCHA (the characters one has to type to leave a comment) really works on blocking spam from robots. A real human has to do the spamming. So the spammers hire people for squat to leave comments and type in the CAPTCHA. I'm just stunned this was your first spam. You must be living right.
    ~jon

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