Stiff upper lip…my foot!

What do these firangs think of themselves? Just because they ruled us for 200 years, do they, by any chance think that they are a superior lot? What else would explain a semi-literate (I assume in my hopping mad state of mind) office assistant to turn down my request to take a message for his boss, that too on international call.
Have been chasing this lawyer in London all day, running down to this cubbyhole of a telephone booth outside office (office here does not have ISD) to call him up only to be told curtly “call him back after half an hour”. Initially, I didn’t lose my cool, trying my other techniques to get through him such as “put me on to someone else in the office in that case” meeting with the same irritating response “please call up after half an hour”.
In regular circumstances I would not have lost my cool. But, because this man insisted on repeating the sentence despite my rather polite requests (repeated three times) to leave my name and number, the man simply repeated “call up after half an hour”. And I lost it.
I told him that as an office assistant the least he is expected to do is to take down my details and ask his boss to call me back. The man, I assume, can only speak not hear. Or, he turns a deaf ear if it’s an Indian on the other end of the phone. And so he said for the nth time, “please call up after half an hour”.
Well, now after having shot a stinker to big man writing damaging things about his office assistant, am still seething.
I just feel that firangs do believe that they are notch above us and can get away with murder. What explains the racist abuses hurled at call center employees in India.
Was reminded of an incident at the Asian Development Bank meeting, when this group of firangs sniggered rather condescendingly when an Indian bureaucrat asked a state chief minister on why students from his state were not considered `employable’.
Am pretty certain that these unemployable graduates from India would make for far better office assistants, who will, if not anything else, have simple phone etiquette.
Huh!