call centre lingo

I was having my usual 6PM coffee + cigarette routine outside my office complex, which incidentally has various IT-related businesses like call centres, medical transcription
centres etc apart from software development companies.

6PM Indian time would be early morning in most parts of the US (except maybe the West
coast) and the US of A is slowly waking up. Europe has already been up for sometime now.
What this means for the Indian call centre industry is that, there are calls to attend and customers to face (over the phone that is).

You can see the cabs hired by call centre companies rushing past as they drop employees
at work. Some of them gather for a quick cigarette before they get in for the night shift.

I did not really intend to overhear their conversation. But they were so close and also so
loud that there was no way I could have avoided hearing it, even if I wanted to. Well, it
was about nothing serious. Just about how they had spent their weekend.

The usual banter about the discos / pubs visited, the hot chicks etc. What did strike me
was that for every two words they uttered, they used either the word "fu.." or some
variation of it. I mean, I can understand it if someone uses that word once in every
sentence, which itself is not a rational use of the word. But, here these guys were like
using it more like punctuation.

Have noticed this phenomenon earlier too and always with call centre guys. I am not in
any way implying that all call-centre guys talk like that. But the ones that do, usually
seem to be from that domain. I was wondering how this speech phenomenon came about.

Do they think its cool ? If so, it is definitely not. It actually sounds crude. Do they think Americans talk like that ? None that I ever met during my trips abroad. It is strange to
see our current Indian generation think of such things as fads.

Well, why blame them when most of us are aping the Western way of life in some way
or the other - food, drinks, materialism, spending, sexual habits, whatever ? While the
westerners having understood the uselessness of their habits are moving towards the
good facets of our culture.