During the longer than expected taxi ride from DFW to downtown Dallas, I managed to carry on a stilted Urdu conversation with the Pakistani driver.
I probably only have a 100 word vocabulary. Still, we were able to discuss Bollywood movies, the sizable South Asian population in Dallas, the too-high cost of living in New York, and my too-fat cat back in DC.
It reminded me a little of trying to explain server virtualization to a banker I met at ISPCON. He started out telling me that he 'didn't speak tech', and was very surprised to realize that he actually totally got the concept. That something so mysterious-sounding could be described in 'regular' words.
I thought both incidents were pretty neat. When people talk about customer education, it's often made out to be such a Herculean task. But maybe the product documentation just needs to be reworded into something as rudimentary as my Urdu vocabulary.
Where did you learn Urdu, Isabel? I learned some growing up around a lot of Pakistanis in London.
Posted by: Hasan Diwan | May 19, 2006 at 02:20 AM