Opportunity - how well could you say it

"Opportunity knocks the door only once" - someone said

Guess we are very well aware of all possible proverbs, idioms and phrases on Opportunity. 

There are certain situations or circumstances that reminds us of good or bad experiences from our memories past. Though we try to avoid it, our subconscious mind constantly tries to pull these memories back. I have experiences of memories flashing whenever I encounter specific scenarios, words, sentences and even food. It might seem strange but I have always wondered how could the brain process so much data and retrieve it when it finds a correlation.

We know we were all practising Brits way of living life right from our childhood days, be it the education system, car driving rules, water tap design or the way how the lights hung from the ceiling, I had learned that there were differences between the Brits and the Americans only when I was in a BPO. 'Lift' is what we say because the Brits 'said so', Americans wanted their own style and called them 'elevators' while technically they were the same. 

Whilst in the BPO, we were asked to pretend like the Americans well at least over the phone. We had pseudo names and I had an alias name that sounded like my name, Susan Morris. The Clients whoever was calling always thought we were an american (while greeting) and we had a common script to use during the initial days. We tried really hard to bring on the accent, however if at any point they realise we had a fake accent (sometimes people mess it up), they used to enquire about the location. We were advised not to reveal the location or any other information unless we were compelled to. We had a lots of protocols to follow that were fed to us right from the day we joined the process.

Training schedule included 50% of technical stuff and the remaining 50% amounted to the communication and most importantly the American accent. On one such accent training class, we were taught about syllables and the stress given to them. The meaning of a sentence differs based on the stress given to the words underlying. My trainer was explaining the types of syllables and gave us samples of words and taught us how the americans pronounce it rolling the 'R' and 'L' out of every other alphabet.

'Opportunity' is not just a word as i remember but something flashes in my mind every time i encounter it. We were asked to repeat the word 'Opportunity' in an american way until we get it correct. The trainer was noticing how perfect we were when delivering the sound and was correcting whenever someone made a mistake. We were to repeat the word until everyone pronounces with no flaw and we were trying hard to impress her. When we were repeating this exercise, she stopped us and looked at everyone, we in turn looked at each other anticipating who would get the next correction. But the trainer seemed confused and asked us to repeat it again. A few minutes passed by, when she asked someone to stand up and told that she heard what he had said. We were all puzzled while he was shocked. She then broke the silence and laughed in a loud voice, saying the guy was simply repeating:

'AAPPA CHUTNEY' for opportunity without the trainer's knowledge, however she had heard it. What made us wonder was that the guy seemed very quiet and was not one of those mischievous types. He was made to repeat the word, oh not 'opportunity' but 'Aappa chutney' 20 times at the stretch as a little penalty. We were laughing  insanely with the trainer when this guy was repeating the word 'appachutney' continously.


Note: For those of you who do not know about 'Aappa chutney', here is a little explanation. Aapam+Chutney is a part of the famous south-indian food items.  APPAM belongs to the Dosa family and Chutney is the spicy sauce :o)