Fuddland
One aspect of the English training centre business out here that I’ve never been entirely comfortable with is what could be described as a form of corporate spying: employees of one training centre pose as potential students at another, to find out about their prices and courses. The turnover of admin and sales staff is high enough to avoid the danger of employees of Training Centre A who visited Training Centre B being recognised when B pays A a visit of their own. To me it seems to be a fairly underhanded way of finding out about local competitors, as well as a pretty lazy method of getting ideas about how to improve one’s own services.
When I occasionally poke one of the managers into defending this tactic, I generally get an answer along the lines of, “Well, everyone else does it.” But when, today, I playfully tsk’d at one of the spies as she headed out of the door on her latest mission, I got a different sort of reply:
What, they don’t do this in your country?
It wasn’t a sarcastic, rhetorical question; nor was it meant to imply that if we don’t do it, we’re clearly doing something wrong—it was asked with a genuine interest. What I found more interesting was my immediate instinct, which was to say, “What?! No, of course not!” But I managed to catch myself and instead gave a stammered, “Um, well, I don’t really know … I hope not.”
But the more I think about it, unless there’s explicitly a law that says it’s illegal to not declare a conflict of interest when enquiring about a company’s services [and it must be a conflict of interest rather than simply posing as a potential customer, because otherwise all those undercover journalist Watchdog-type investigations would be breaking the law on a regular basis], then I don’t actually have any basis to tut-tut this activity other than my own moral standards.
On a related note, a few weeks ago a new student joined a class that I teaching on Sunday mornings. It’s a good group of people from all sorts of different companies that like doing vaguely business-related role-plays, so I welcomed the newcomer, asked her what line of work she was in and was surprised when she replied that she works at the reception desk for a competing English training centre. Thinking that she was either the worst spy in the world, or that her company’s own services must be pretty dire, I asked her why she had joined [and paid for] this group instead of asking her own company if she could sit in on a few lessons a week there. She said that she wanted to improve her English without her employer knowing she was taking extra lessons, at which point I stopped making further enquiries. It’s a source of constant bewilderment to me why people do things that I don’t understand or agree with.
