Politics

Do you have an accent?…or in other words, are you ‘polished enough’  Not my words though…
In one of the dailies yesterday there was a disturbing piece of how a Kenyan man had lost his job in 2012 which used to earn him $75,000 (Ksh6.4 Million) a year.
This did not happen in Kenya though but in the USA.
Mr David Mwangangi used to work with Kenexa Technology Company where he was fired because he had an accent which to his former employer portrayed him as an not ‘polished enough’
In one incident, Mr Mwangangi says that during his tenure at Kenexa he was assigned to a client named Eli Lilly and Compnay which is in Indiana.
He says that the Operations Manager who is identified as Brian Hoffman singled out him out and told him that the company did not want anyone with a foreign accent to speak to the company’s director.
Very disturbing piece don’t you think? It’s a crazy world we live in.
It seems one has to be polished enough to speak to certain people or they would ‘jeopardize’ the image of the company.
And our question this morning, have you been treated differently at your work place (here in Kenya) simply because you have an accent which makes you come across as not ‘polished enough’?