This won’t impact many readers of this blog (there AREN’T many readers of this blog), but I wanted to get it off my chest.
So this morning I went to log into my IBM cloud account. My account which was created with IBM Italia. My account which specified my language as being Italian. My account which had Italian specified as the display language.
Now, I will admit that quite a few months back they did indeed send me an e-mail advising me that my password was about to expire… in Italian, even! “La tua password IBM sta per scadere – Ti invitiamo a prenderne nota”. However first, I hadn’t been using the account for some time by that point, and second it was buried in amongst a bunch of notifications of conferences that I wasn’t interested in attending. Insomma, non l’avevo visto prima di oggi. (I missed it.)
(Aside: “la TUA password”? “TI invitiamo”? How nice that we’re “friends”, IBM. For non-Italian speakers, this is the informal version of the language. I would expect the language between a multinational company and its customers to be a tad more formal and respectful. But hey, “hip”, “cool” and “casual” are the first three words that you think of when it comes to IBM, non è vero?)
So when I went to log in, I was advised that my password was invalid. Not that it had expired, but that it was invalid. Ah, good UX, that. I looked through past e-mails and found the one mentioned above, and set about doing the “forgotten password” routine.
After navigating through a whole bunch of dialogues IN ENGLISH, I finally got back into my account and found that all of my profile entries had been reset to English. I thus assiduously set everything back to Italian and up popped a box asking me what I thought of IBM. In which language?
Look, I get that IBM is an American company but if they can’t handle operating beyond the Anglosphere, let’s change the first initial, shall we?
As I said in the comments that I wrote in the dialogue above:
I’d write this in Italian but since IBM Italia seems to consist of a guy named Frank who was sent from New York with a Fromer’s phrase guide, I’ll say this in inglese… if someone is based in a non-English speaking country and has chosen to receive communications in a non-English language and has their profile page set to a non-English language then WHY THE HELL do you keep communicating with them in English??? And for that, I include the very dialog that I am entering this into. Why exactly DID you put the “I” in “IBM” when you don’t seem to be comfortable operating more than 125 km, sorry, “77 Miles”, from Dogsbreath Nebraska??
Obviously I’m comfortable reading English and speaking English, but not all Italians are, not all Germans are, not all French are… shall I go on?
Well done Anglosphere Business Machines, I look forward to your name change being logged with the S.E.C.
A dopo allora!