The people's republic of skype

When Skype first appeared and made it possible to do video and audio chats without feeling that you were trapped in an echo chamber surrounded by angry Daleks the Chinese used it to go shopping, for oil.

 I had signed up with the location Moscow and the language English, ah they were simpler times: now I offer myself as the only speaker of classical Mongolian in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte and life is quiet once more.

 But back then in 04 or so I knew nothing of the Asiatic cyber hordes awaiting me. I had hardly got it set up before the damn thing was ringing at me and the people on the other end all had Victorian English names, like Polly or Violet. There are people the world over adopting English names to save us the trouble of pronouncing Makweflkyaphphlpgplg or whatever their doting mothers called them. So I started answering, you remember when answering unsolicited calls wasn’t on a par with wandering into an alley and asking a group of 8 tattooed and swarthy martial arts experts to help you work out this weird foreign money you had? Simpler times as I say.

 And they wanted oil. Sometimes a single voice would appear and ask how you were, sometimes a room full of people was on the other end, all of them shouting in Chinese at the one poor secretary who had lied about knowing English in order to get the job.

“Please” they would cry: “oil, you give oil.”

I used to explain that I was an English teacher and all I had was some sunflower oil in the kitchen, but it didn’t help. They had a contact now and they had clearly spent too many long and painful hours shouting in Chinese at people shouting back in Russian to let me go without a fight.

Occasionally, I would get someone, usually a young woman, who could actually speak English at a level that made communication possible. One or two even became cyber pals for a few months and would call now and then to ask about Russia and England and, in return, they would tell me about life in whatever part of China they were living. It was never Beijing or Shanghai; I guess oil purchasing was easier in the megacities.

I worked then, as I still do occasionally, with oil analysts and oil traders and such and so it was easy to get a list of links that I could post in the chat window, and that made it easier, but not much. They still kept coming, and there was mounting evidence that my skype details were being published daily in the country’s newspapers. It was after I had spent three days calling Kiev to arrange a shipment of frozen squid for a woman from Chongqing who called herself Lucy that I decided it had to stop, and changed my Skype name.

I suspect that the vast economic changes in the developing world that we read about in the Economist or FT mostly begin with confused people shouting on Skype in languages they don’t really know. Then I suppose middle men and systems get established and a recognizable world of business evolves.