As with most employers, 63336 see recruiting overseas researchers as an opportunity. It is an opportunity because it is always useful for a service that operates 24 hours a day to have researchers from different time zones as part of the team and because these researchers bring a different perspective and vibrancy to our answers.

It’s not easy to apply for a job in a different country, but overseas researchers complement the excellent researchers we have in the UK.

What will you get from it?

This is a great opportunity to work for the UK’s most popular text Q&A service. If that’s not enough, you work from home at hours that are convenient to you and we’ll pay you for every question that you answer. Your performance will be reviewed regularly to ensure you meet our high standards. Yes, you can stay in bed, start work when you like and earn money doing something challenging, diverse and interesting.

If you are starting to think this could be ideal, you’ll be interested in ‘So you fancy a job with 63336′. However, if you have never visited the UK, it is well worth spending some time to appreciate some of the cultural differences and potential pitfalls.

What are the differences?

It doesn’t matter where you live, submitting a successful application is difficult. During the process, applicants are asked about their experience in the UK and this is an opportunity to make it clear why you would be good at answering the UK’s questions.

One Australian applicant was keen to point out that visiting the UK was like going back “to the 1980s”. Thinking the UK is stuck in the 1980s is not the best approach. After all, there have been some advances and it’s not all ripped denim, shoulder pads, shell suits and big hair.

Also, speaking English doesn’t always guarantee an understanding of questions from the UK. There are many differences and you need to acknowledge this. Sometimes these are obvious, sometimes much more subtle. They include spelling variations, currency, weights and measures, sport, travel, TV and many more things in everyday life. It can be confusing and, without recognising some of the cultural idiosyncrasies, it will be hard to succeed in your application.

Some of these differences are highlighted at every stage of the application procedure. Here are some examples:

Q: Glasgoe Knorich train
A: The Glasgow to Norwich train ride is 314 miles and 506 kilometers. There is a train rout that goes from Glasgow to Norwich. Bring a book along!

Q: Which cost more debenhems or boots for make up?
A: Debenhams has a wide selection of boots and make up products. Boots can run as low as 25 pounds. Whereas, many make up products are less expensive.
or
A: Debenhams can cost over 400 pounds, so boots would be cheaper right now. It is a great look, but who knew it could be so pricey?

Q: How long is a Smartie’s tube to the nearest millimetre?
A: The length of a Smarties tube is between 755mm to 760mm but only Smarties have the ‘real’ answer!

Q: Hi! Can you pick me a fantasy football team for The Sun’s competition?
A: Choosing a fantasy football team can be tricky. Try watching football live. It’s so much better than pretend.
or
A: Sure, Try playing against the Spectacular Zebras, heard they were good this year, 17-0.

Some applicants aren’t in touch with the type of questions people are asking, but others offer a different perspective and sometimes mix it with flashes of brilliance and humour. And remember, it’s humour not humor.

Getting the customer’s perspective

One recent test question highlighted many of the difficulties more than most:

Q: Will Saints be promoted from League 1 this season?

To some this will seem a relatively straightforward question about Southampton FC (Saints), but to others it conjured up images of the NFL, Super Bowl XLIV and answers asking: Who dat?

Many of the answers given by applicants were intelligent and showed a genuine interest and knowledge of football (not American football), and an understanding of the UK is clearly an advantage.

It may be a step too far to claim Sean Payton’s time with the Leicester Panthers influenced the outcome of the Super Bowl, but it is always easy to have an idea, make an assumption and run with it. The best approach is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. If the difference between Southampton FC (Saints) and New Orleans Saints is still unclear, a quick look here may help.

Making a difference

Our answers rely on great content, accurate British English, opinion and humour to maintain 63336’s unique identity. It is this style that builds recognition and customer affection.

If you can see this and understand there is more to the UK than being a “good place with all the climatic conditions”, then you may be exactly what we are looking for.

If you feel you can make a difference and want to become a 63336 researcher, we want to hear from you. One applicant claimed an “ability to think of my feet” would help in the role. More important is fluency in English and excellent writing skills. We do provide computer systems that will help, but you also need to be able to use your own knowledge, and internet search skills, to create brilliant answers to wow our customers. So, if you’re not busy thinking of your feet and think you’re good enough – you should apply. Just click here for details.

N.B. All the examples and quotes used above are from real 63336 application forms and tests. Follow us on twitter for latest news, questions and humour from 63336.

When we set up the 63336 service, we designed it so it didn’t matter about your spelling, whether you used txtspk or your question was full of slang, as it’s skilled human researchers that power 63336 and they can answer practically any question you’ve got.

Our researchers work to a guide that helps you get the best answers for your £1. This guide focuses on providing well written, accurate, fast answers that are often witty and provide extra wow factor. But it also helps researchers to decide what they can’t (for legal reasons), or won’t (for our editorial purposes) answer.

Although our policy has remained relatively unchanged over the last four years, we’re updating it today, because we believe that instilling the habit of politeness in the UK will have significant positive effects not only for our workers, but for all individuals and possibly the economy too.

What you need to do

Q: Where the hell are my bleeding keys?

63336: Hello. Your keys are under the sofa. They fell out of your pocket when you flumped down in front of the TV last night. Hope you haven’t been too inconvenienced.

From today, if you ask questions like this we will simply choose not to answer. You’ll need to make your requests much more polite. The easiest way to do this is for 63336 to mandate that all customers use the word ‘please’ in all questions.

However, to make it easier during what we expect to be a difficult transitional period, we’ve agreed that including one or more kisses (”x”) will be an acceptable alternative to the actual “please” for the next six months.

If customers fail to comply, they will receive our new standard response, “Sorry, you did not say please when you asked your question. Please can you re-submit your text with a please in order to get an answer. Thank you. x”

Why we are adopting this new approach

Our service is by nature anonymous, so we know to expect the unexpected. We’ve never been too shocked to be propositioned (these range from straightforward marriage proposals to “would you prefer me in French knickers or g-strings?”), and kisses at the end of questions delight us. However, in the last year – perhaps driven by the recession – we’ve seen a marked change in the way that new customers in particular use the service. They just aren’t as nice.

In 2005 and 2006 we received, on average, a kiss/please/thank you once every 30 questions. In the last year this has dropped sharply – it’s now less than one in 100 questions. Swearing has also risen dramatically, from 1 expletive in every 200 questions to 1 in every 40. It’s not big, and it’s not clever.

You might not think this matters, but a decrease in politeness, and an increase in customers who need their mouths washed out with soap, has had a substantial negative effect on our researchers. They face 12,000 of these questions every day. We want to protect our workforce, but we also want to instil some of our own high standards of politeness into our customers.

And with good reason, as it turns out.

A little politeness makes a big difference

As part of this process, we commissioned research from the Association of Promoting Intelligent Language. The research confirmed a decline in standards of politeness in today’s society, as well as, interestingly, a high correlation between increase in rudeness and decrease in economic growth. Whilst we’re not claiming (yet) that the recession has been entirely due to people being less nice to each other, the results make some stark reading:

Comparing the early 1990s with 2010, the research showed that:

- Parents who consider ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ essential communication tools has fallen from 85% to 55%
- Postmen and women reported a 75% decrease in greetings from the public on their morning rounds. Correspondingly, postal deliveries have been 81% slower in the same period
- In 2010, 89% of adults said an average of 3 “thank yous” and 1.8 smiles per transaction were necessary to get them to return to a shop and spend money

After receiving this commissioned research, we undertook a survey of 1,000 of our customers, asking them whether we should instil higher standards. 73% approved of a strong editorial stance, whilst only 7% objected. 6% refused to take part in the survey (and have since been barred) whilst 14% expressed no opinion or did not understand the question.

It’s as a result of this compelling evidence that we’ve decided to take strong action, both for the good of our researchers and the future of the UK.

How to be polite

If it’s been a while since you were polite, here’s a brief guide to what is acceptable, and what simply won’t do anymore.

Sorry, but starting today we will no longer accept:

Give me the bus times to Chipping Norton right now

I want a list of the films made in the 1990s, all of them

Oi loser, tell me what colour pants I’m wearing or I’ll never text you again

Instead, we would like, please:

Please can you tell me the better way of saying i can’t hear other than ‘what’.

Will you marry me 63336? XxX

Could I trouble you for the next 3 trains to Upminster, please?

Thank you for your attention. Have a nice day.

Editors note: (2/4/2010) This is of course an April Fool’s, see our new post here.

The explanation is simple. If the SPG can’t be trusted, why should the customer trust the accuracy of the answer’s content? Our customers have spent £1 to ask us a question, and we believe our use of correct English and our attention to detail shows that we care about working hard to craft the whole answer. We’re not just concerned about getting an accurate answer to the customer quickly; if that was the case, many of our answers would be short, but we believe that would be short-changing the customer. We have a particular style of answers that our customers tell us they like.

So, excellent writing skills are essential if you want to become a 63336 researcher. 63336 is proud of its impeccable English, but is it becoming a rare breed?

Do people care whether full stops are in the right place, or even whether words are spelt correctly, as long as we can comprehend what’s being said? That is the issue. There comes a point at which language becomes so corrupted that we can no longer understand it on first, second, or even third reading. As the Roman rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilian said  quite a few years ago (you know the one – he lived c. AD 35-90): 

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

We all appreciate that English is a living, changing language, but 63336 is clear about where it draws the line.

No text speak please; we speak English 

Despite being a text-based service, 63336 would never consider employing txt spk – sorry, text speak – such as gr8, cul8r, lmao (or even roflmao). Of course, if we thought it would be more popular with customers, we would probably use it, but that’s turned out not to be the case. Customers new to 63336 receive a welcome message saying, “Finally, welcome to 63336. Please save 63336 in your phone for when you next need us.” We don’t urge the customer to “plzz txt bak”.

However, we do understand there’s a place for the creative expansion of language. Many argue that today’s terminology is not so much the end of our language, but more a progression of it; it’s a kind of high-tech shorthand necessitated by the use of modern technology and by our general lack of time – and, actually, such shorthand isn’t quite as modern as some would believe. The first evidence of an emoticon appeared in a speech by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 (it was a wink, although arguments still rage as to whether it was a deliberate emoticon or whether it was a typo).

So, at 63336, we’re always clear and concise, and we turn our backs on anything that could be ambiguous or incomprehensible – but that’s just part of the SPG issue.

The nation’s SPG in decline

Deliberate truncation of the English language is one thing; the deterioration in the nation’s basic SPG skills is another. Sadly, these errors are witnessed in all areas of life. 

For instance, a sign spotted recently in a shop window boasted:

Spesial offer – all jewlry 50p.

Whilst bad, at least this was scrawled in marker pen, very temporarily, on the glass. More annoying are the ‘professionally’ printed, permanent signs. Why not proofread these messages before going to the expense of having incorrect words emblazoned across shopfronts or company cars?

Cars for sale: all makes and modles. 

Credit cards excepted. 

No unortherised parking. 

Then there’s the greengrocers’ apostrophe (using an apostrophe incorrectly to form a plural):

Cake’s for all occasion’s: wedding’s, birthday’s, anniversary’s.

Computer repair’s and upgrade’s. 

And just common mistakes:

Last but defiantly not least. 

Your my best friend. 

Their’s a bus stop opposite the supermarket.

“It’s OK”, you say, “I would never do such a thing; I’ve got a PC and I run everything through my spellchecker to ensure my writing is perfect.” If this is you, think again. The following poem Candidate for a Pullet Surprise (or Owed to a Spelling Checker) was written by Professor Jerrold Zar and Mark Eckman as a cautionary tale:

 I have a spelling checker.

It came with my PC.

It plane lee marks four my revue

Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

  

Eye ran this poem threw it,

Your sure reel glad two no.

Its vary polished inn it’s weigh.

My checker tolled me sew.

 

A checker is a bless sing,

It freeze yew lodes of thyme.

It helps me right awl stiles two reed,

And aides me when aye rime.

 

..and there are 6 more (verses)

Whilst more sophisticated spell checkers use language models to look at the context and will point out some of the errors, lesser programs find little or no fault with the above verses.

So, we’re sure you’ll be relieved to know that 63336 is standing up for the nation’s SPG standards. It doesn’t rely on unreliable spell checkers. Of course, they’re handy as a back-up, but 63336 ultimately relies on the expertise of its researchers, allowing us to bring you perfectly constructed, as well as perfectly researched, top quality answers. (If you think you’re up to it, you’ll be interested in “So you fancy a job with 63336?”

So, finally, would 63336 ever consider lowering its SPG standards – even just a little?

Neva m8. Lol.