I’ve been watching the occasional episode of “Outsourced,” the new NBC sitcom set in Mumbai in the outsourced call center for a Kansas City novelty company that makes toilet-shaped coffee mugs, foam cheeseheads, and other glories of American civilization. Culture clash and chuckles (or groans) ensue. My favorite line so far came from one of the Indian employees, perplexed upon her first encounter with a high-larious “mistletoe belt”: “This is how you celebrate the birth of the son of your god?”
I have my own reasons for bafflement. Take a look at the show’s opening credits, crafted in the style of Bollywood musicals.
I could watch this sequence over and over . . . and I still wouldn’t know the meaning of the tiny type on the screen: “Cine Mapar” and “In Givacolor.”
A Google search turns up zero matches for “Cine Mapar,” so I assume it’s an invention of the show’s creators. It may be a spoof, but of what?
Likewise, “Givacolor” has no matches. I did find a few hits for Gevacolor, including this 1961 ad, which identifies Gevacolor as a proprietary term of the film company Gevaert (now Agfa-Gevaert; Agfa and Gevaert merged in 1964). The copy reads, in part: “Gevacolor gives you transparencies, colour prints, and cine film with a richness of quality to satisfy the sternest critics . . .”
Hmmm. A possibility. But then I discovered this:
Giva, based in Santa Clara, California, describes itself as an “award winning provider of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Web-based ITIL Help Desk, Customer Service/Call Center and Service Desk cloud based computing services.” But dig a little deeper and you find this:
Giva has a special industry focus on outsourcing IT help desks and outsourced technical support providers.
One of Giva’s clients is Williams Lea, “the leader in the outsourcing industry among financial institutions and law firms, providing services to eight of the top 10 investment banks and more than 90 percent of the top 200 law firms.”
Coincidence? Perhaps. I prefer to credit the show’s writers with a very sneaky sense of humor.
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