Take action: Jazztel

While in Shanghai this week, I continued to keep in touch, as usual, with what happens in my dear Catalonia. I read in e-noticies a piece of news that described the policies of the telecommunication company Jazztel. Apparently this company only accepts communications in Spanish even though is sells products and services in the Catalan speaking territories of Spain where Catalan is the official language.I am not surprised that Jazztel tries to get away with it. Companies hate diversity, “one size fits all” is the best methodology to reduce cost. Customization and localization cost money even if you have embedded DFD (design for diversity) in your design process. But market forces are able to counterbalance the natural tendency of companies to avoid diversity. My biggest issue is the reaction of some people to Jazztel arrogant position. The worst attitude is the ‘botifleristic” approach. One guy was saying, if by having Catalan customer service I will have to pay more, forget about it. These are the kind of people who have made us lose all battles since the Trastamaras, people who would not move a finger to support their country and that would sell it for personal gain, like Mas with the Estatut (Catalan Constitution), like Carod-Rovira and Montilla with TV3 in Valencia and so on.
Let me tell you, if the vast majority of Catalans wanted products and services in Catalan we would have them, the applicable techniques: solidarity, perseveration and market economy.
Let me explain you how this would work for Jazztel. All Catalans or at least the 60%-70% who care about their language, should stop using Jazztel and switch to a carrier where service is offered in Catalan (preferably in Catalan, Spanish and English, my trilingual dream), even if it is more expensive. After a few weeks, the market share of Jazztel in Catalonia, the most affluent area in the country, would be so low that they would put together a taskforce to try to reverse the trend. After analyzing the exit interviews, they would conclude that the solution was an aggressive marketing campaign in Catalan with attractive prices and the set-up of a call center in Catalonia to serve the customers in Catalan.In order to maintain the margins in Spain, they would be forced to go for a second round of outsourcing and move more jobs from Spain to Argentina. A few months ago, Jazztel shut down the call center in Galicia and moved it to Argentina (que bueno que chamaste), read it here and here.
Conclusion, in a few months, we would have Jazztel in Catalan, we would have created jobs in Catalonia (pretty difficult to outsource, maybe to Valencia, Andorra or L’Alguer) and it would have cost us close to nothing.

In a larger scale, the solution is even easier. Let’s assume that we declare the months of October 2007 and February 2008 as the months of Catalan in labeling and services with the support of all society, consumer associations, political parties (except PP), etc. It should be a non political exercise, not a boycott, but an exercise of consumer preferences. During the month of October, only products and services that would offer labeling and customer support also in Catalan (I am not saying only in Catalan) would be chosen. We may suffer a little bit, we may have to pay more for some products, we may even have to narrow our selection, maybe have only lettuce and onions for a couple of days, but it will be worth while. In November, after having given our warning signal, we would go back to our normal consumption habits, while all the companies that got the message would start to address the Catalan market seriously developing labeling, graphic interfaces, directions for use and service centers in Catalan. When in February, the campaign would reinitiate, the choice of products would be much wider, the price differential insignificant and those manufacturers who chose to ignore the customer requirement would be definitely out of the Catalan landscape.
There is only one aspect that worries me and it is collusion. I have the feeling that it already exists today and we need to bring it to the open. I am afraid that many companies have agreed on certain rules of the game to avoid that one of them goes full speed with Catalan and the others are forced to follow. The solution is called “whistleblower”, someone needs to produce an internal document or trail of emails to prove it and the justice system will do its job. Collusion and price fixing are illegal practices.



Note: The videoclip is an edited version of an original Motorola ad. The company SardanaTel only exists in my imagination, maybe now in yours too.

I am NOT Hispanic.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) loosely defines Hispanic as someone of any race whose ancestors were born in a country where Spanish is the official tongue. According to this definition, Brazilians, Portuguese and Andorrans are not Hispanic, but Catalans are. As minorities we supposedly have all kinds of advantages in what is called positive discrimination.
Many Americans (and this includes governmental employees) still confuse race and ethnicity (even in the official forms) and think that all Hispanic are what ethnically is called mestizo, that is to say, a brown skin mixture of white and native American.

But I have to tell you, I am a Catalan. Yes, I have a Spanish passport, but I am not Hispanic and I do not want to be. My mother tongue is Catalan and about my race, plain white. So, thank you very much, I do not need any positive discrimination, I do not want any help. Do you mean that if I had been raised in Spanish, I would be handicapped and I would need a favor? Absolutely disgusting!

When asked, I always tell the truth, race: white (most probably a mixture of Celts, Iberians, Greeks, Romans, Franks, north European Barbarians with some drops of Arab and Jewish blood), nationality: Spanish (that’s what my passport says), ethnicity: Catalan. I assume that some of the federal agencies have put a working group together to find out what Catalan ethnicity is (OK, the reality is that Catalan ethnicity appears under Hispanic in the US census with the code 204).

Luckily my color, my family name (Llorens) and my slight accent (Catalan, but most of the people confuse it with French or French Canadian) keep me off the Hispanic-targeted telemarketing campaigns.

I see many people in USA who are very worried about Spanish taking over from English. Two months ago, the congress quickly put together a law declaring English the official language of the United States. Calm down, do not worry too much, the Spanish spoken on the streets of USA is terrible and it is getting worse and worse, as we speak.
Phrases as: “Aplicar pa un trabajo” (Apply for a job), “Llámame p’atrás” (call me back), “El interé de tu mortgage”, make me sick. I cannot help it, I am a language purist.
However the government does not seem to have any kind of remorse when using Spanish to recruit people for the military (I took the attached picture in my town, where the Hispanic population is close to zero).

I have also observed another interesting phenomenon. When I talk in Spanish to people from South and Central America who live in USA, most of the times, they refuse to answer back in Spanish, even if they were talking in Spanish among themselves. Also very often, they switch to English when I get close by (by the way, most of them speak an American English 10 times better than mine). I dislike this attitude. Even if I do not consider myself Hispanic, I am proud to speak standard Castilian Spanish, and I would never switch language, just because a perceived Anglo is walking past.

To summarize, I do not need any kind of discrimination, neither positive, not negative. Look at my green eyes and judge me for what I am. But if I need to identify myself, I will always proudly say, I AM A CATALAN.

Do not get married by a piglet

Two weeks ago, I read in the Catalan e-papers an unbelievable story. A Catalan couple who lived in Madrid, went back to Barcelona in order to have their wedding ceremony held in Catalan.
To their dismay, the judge refused to marry them in Catalan. The were told that if they wanted to get married in Catalan, they had to wait to the end of the day, after all the other couples were married, and after that, maybe someone would marry them in Catalan. The name of the judge is Antonio Lechón (literally Anthony Piglet).
The even more amazing thing is that the judge was getting an allowance (additional monies on top of his salary as judge) because he had demonstrated command of the Catalan language.

The couple sued the judge and they lost. The reason: judges are not required to speak Catalan, even if operating in Catalonia and, apparently, even if they are paid additional money for having demonstrated proficiency in the Catalan language.

But we should not be surprised, this is another clear demonstration that Catalonia is still in a colonial situation as it has been in the last 300 years.

It all started with the Decree of New Foundation issued on January 16th, 1716 by King Philip V. In the 6th paragraph, he clearly states:
"Las causas en la Real Audiencia (de Barcelona) se substanciaran en lengua Castellana, y para que por la mayor satisfacion de las partes, los incidentes de las Causas, se traten con mayor deliberacion, mando que todas las Peticiones, presentaciones de Instrumentos, y lo demas que se ofreciere, se haga en las Salas...." (this can be summarized as 'all proceedings in the Barcelona Supreme Court will be held in Castilian languange only').
For the first time in the history of Catalonia (and the County of Barcelona), Castilian was imposed as the only language that could be used in legal procedings. Before that date (1716), Catalan and Latin (in some documents) were used. Castilian was, up to that point, a foreign language.

This Decree has never been revoked and it is therefore, legally speaking, still applicable. For this reason, we should not be surprised about Mr. Piglet winnimg the case.

Conclusion: Never get married by a Piglet!!!

By the way, since we are talking about pigs, let me tell you a free translation of a joke that Johnny Tastavins forwarded to me yesterday:

José Maria Aznar, Eduardo Zaplana, Ángel Acebes were driving to downtown Madrid in a stretched limo to meet Zapatero. When they were still in the outskirts of Madrid, three pigs suddenly appeared in the middle of the road. The driver was unable to avoid them, hit them and killed them on the spot. The three politicians of the conservative Popular Party got out of the car and inspected the damage to the Party's limo and noticed that it was severely dented. When Rajoy saw the extent of the damage, he got mad and told the driver: "Go right now and find out who the owner of these three pigs is, I am going to sue him. We will wait for you here". After a couple of hours, they saw the driver staggering towards them. He was drunk, had red eyes and a smiley face. Zaplana asked him: "What happened? Did you find that bastard?". The driver nodded and said "it was a farmer and he gave me this expensive bottle of brandy, his wife gave me this box of cigars and his daughter gave me three blow jobs".
Acebes interjected, "what did you tell them?.
The driver answered. "I just told them that I was the driver of Aznar, Zaplana and Acebes, that I had an accident and I had killed three pigs".

'John Cleese is the son of a bitch' would rhyme for Manuel

The comments deserve something a little more elaborated than a laconic reply. Therefore I have decided to make a post.

I would like to thank Tom for the clarification. I have changed the text to put the blame only on John Cleese, what makes me feel much better, because I actually like many of the other works of Monty Python, especially Brian's life. I also agree that Manuel is a nice guy. Most probably he would make a much better job representing Barcelona than our current rising star of diplomacy, Carod-Rovira.

I would also like to take some time to reply to Garci.
I can understand that your intellectually challenged friends (aka retarded or intellectually disabled) resonate with Manolo.

It is funny, however, that you do not identify yourself with him, but you have no problem to link him with the non Catalan speaking population born in Barcelona. By the way, the fact that 50% of the people from Catalonia does not have Catalan as mother tongue, does not mean that they do not speak Catalan (the percentage of Barcelona born people who speak Catalan is in the high 90s) and it does not mean either that they have Castilian or Andalusian accent. In general those Catalans who were born in Catalonia and have Spanish as mother tongue speak pretty neutral Spanish, sometimes with a slight palatal l and ll and use some Catalan words to describe some specific things where the Catalan word fits better, as for example “plegar” (finish your workday or quite a job voluntarily).

Regarding languages, I speak Dutch and German, Catalan and Spanish, and from all points of view, grammar, vocabulary and phonetics the percentage of correlation is very close in those 2 pairs (80% to 85% depending on the text, if you use kadoje instead of geschenk, the correlation is lower, for instance). Flemish and Dutch have dialectal differences similar to Catalan and Valencian, with a fundamental difference, in 1980 the Dutch and Belgian governments signed the “Taalunieverdrag”, a treaty that recognized that Dutch and Flemish were the same language under the name of Nederlands.

As usual, I will ignore your “under the belt” attack. Those things I mention are common themes for the Catalan stereotype in the rest of the Spain, used in jokes and parodies, and that have a certain foundation, although they are normally an exaggeration or a distortion of reality. And about my kids, I am trying to do my best to educate them well and I make them citizens of the world. However, I had my 8 year old daughter next to me when I was preparing the previous posting and she saw the video clip and asked me, are the people from Barcelona so stupid? Although she has never lived in Barcelona, she was born there. I did not reply, just closed the window.

And yes, I am upset and pissed off and I have the right to be. To be frank I would also be upset (maybe slightly less, but still upset) if Manuel had been from Madrid or Seville and a little been upset if Manuel had been from South America. However I would have enjoyed the series, if he had been Italian or French. Because I like Spain and the Spanish people. My problem is that Spain is now an enlarged Castile, and all efforts are being made to shield any other cultures and languages from the rest of the world. Today’s Spain is not my country, I do not feel represented at all, as I do not feel represented by Manuel.

But judge by yourself, let me copy and paste the description of the character from Wikipedia:
“Manuel, a waiter played by Andrew Sachs, is a well-meaning but disorganised and constantly confused Spaniard from Barcelona with a poor grasp of the English language and customs. He is constantly verbally and physically abused by his boss. He is afraid of Mr. Fawlty's quick temper and violent assaults, yet often expresses his appreciation for being given the position. When told by either Basil, Sybil, or Polly what to do, he answers, "Qué?", which means 'What?', and "Sí", which means 'Yes'.
The character's nationality was switched to Mexican for the Spanish dub of the show broadcast to most of Spain, while in the Basque region he is an Italian called Manolo”

And do not forget that when they try to explain to others the rootcause of his imbecility, they justify it as saying, “he is from Barcelona”.

I know it is difficult for you to understand the feeling since you are not from Barcelona, but Tom or even you, if you love UK, can get a taste of it when reading my rant about the British bitches, meant to be a figure of speech without much sophistication.
And the problem is that those stereotypes stick for years, especially among certain parts of the society and they are difficult to change. Be honest and tell me how would you react if you read a piece of news saying that Harvard university has decided to establish its European campus in Lepe.

Catalan and Market Economy

Unfortunately the best word to describe us Catalans is a Spanish one: “gilipollas”. There’s plenty of Catalan words that have a similar meaning (“beneit, ximple, babau, beneit del cabàs, curt, poca-solta, …”), but none of them describes this special kind of acquired moronity that characterizes us. Led by politicians whose brain is the size of a mosquito’s testicle, we act as a divided people with neither ambition not pride. It’s 500 years of lowering our heads and those who dared to raise it were betrayed by their own neighbors ("botiflers").

I love market economy and I am appalled by the fact that most Catalans put all the responsibility of the situation of our nation and especially, our language, on the government. Dear fellow citizens, our government is useless, the brainpower of the whole cabinet put together would not rival the one of an Australopithecus having a bad day. Write them off. They would sell you and their mother, for an ephemeral political gain.

The power is in our cash, credit cards, cash cards, checks and bank accounts. Let’s put our money only on those products that offer user interfaces, directions for use, call centers, labels and advertisements in Catalan. Let’s value the customer focus of those companies that believe that satisfying the Catalan customers is worth while the effort of creating diversity in their product portfolio.
If a company from Albacete offers a product labeled in Catalan and a company from Palau de Plegamans offers a similar product only labeled in Spanish, let’s all massively buy the one from Albacete.
Even assuming that only 50% of the Catalan speaking people gives a damn about their language, that makes a good 5 million people with a purchasing power bigger than many mid and small size European countries with solid line borders around them. When the market share in the Catalan speaking areas of those companies who refuse to offer their services in Catalan plummet, you will see how quickly all of them will offer their products and services in Catalan.
I personally hope that one day, every product distributed in Catalonia will be labed in three languages (Catalan, English and Spanish), any call center and service website will be in those three languages and every shop assistant, taxi driver, policeman, etc will be fluent in those three languages too.

It is in our hands. Let’s not look at the country of origin of the products to decide whether we buy them or not, let’s check whether they have been tailored to satisfy our needs, thinking that we, Catalan customers, are important for this or that company, let’s favor those businesses that value us and are willing to spend some resources to meet our needs and let’s be ready to pay a little bit more for those products too.

If we act this way, you will see how fast the language will be normalized and we will be able to reserve the adjective “gilipollas” only for our politicians.

Note: as a business person, I am aware that the distribution of multi-language labeled products poses a big challenge in Spain. Many Spanish people would boycott products that are labeled in Spanish and Catalan and distributed outside the Catalan speaking areas, simply because Catalan is also on the label. As you can see, Spain is not Belgium, Singapore, Switzerland or Canada.

I am getting ready to fly to Shanghai and practise my Mandarin. Zai jian.

Pep Priorat i Aguiló: Presidente

As some of you will still remember, today is George Washington's birthday and so is mine. Therefore I plan to write about a president that will never exist, Pep Priorat i Aguiló, "Presidente" of Spain.

Many inside, but especially outside Catalonia thought that Catalonia would never have a president that did not have Catalan roots. They all have been proven wrong. Our current president, José Montilla Aguilera, has no Catalan blood whatsoever and he was not even born in Catalonia. He did not even change his first name to Josep (he did that only in previous elections, but not anymore) and he is clearly no "Terminator" either.

Personally I think that laws should require a president be born in Catalonia to run for office, mainly trying to avoid conflict of interests and to warranty allegiance to the country he/she serves. But anyway, José was elected legally and democratically and therefore he is our president, whether or not I like it, and most probably he will do a better job than many of his colleagues of the "tripartit".
So yes, it is proven, a non Catalan born person can become the president of Catalonia, but could a Catalan become the president of the Kingdom of Spain? The answer is categorically NO. Any party that proposes a Catalan candidate to run for office would definitely lose the elections, Pep Priorat i Aguiló has absolutely no chances at all to win the Spanish presidential elections. And you will ask me why? Very simple, Spaniards consider Catalans Spanish, but not as Spanish as the rest. They do not trust us, they believe that we are different, but they are horrified by a potential split.
Let’s not forget that when Miquel Roca i Junyent ran for president in 1986 as the candidate for the Reformist Party, he only got 0.96% of the votes and not a single representative in the House. If he had been called Miguel Piedra Afluente, he would have got a much better result, maybe even the presidency, but he had the wrong name and the wrong origin. Funnily he was born near Bordeaux (in Caudéran, to be exact) when his parents fled the ditactorship, so he could not be Catalan president either if my rule took effect (neither could my son, a New Englander).
Some of you may point out that indeed there were two Catalan presidents in the past.

Estanislao Figueres i Moragues (February 1873 – June 1873) and Francesc Pi i Margall (June 1873 –July 1873) were the first two presidents of the Spanish first Republic, but the fact that they stayed altogether 6 months in power, only proves my point.
Finally, some of you may suggest that I am forgetting one Catalan president of the second Spanish Republic, Alejandro Lerroux, but he was not a Catalan. He was, as our current president, also from Cordoba.

Conclusion: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Catalan to become president of Spain." (Mark 10:25 with some help)