There are six gleaming clocks on the wall of the call center, telling the time in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York, London and Nairobi.
The last is the biggest surprise. Despite the potential hazards of power cuts, corruption and lousy telephone lines, Kenya's first international call center is eager to steal a slice of the action from Bangalore.
Kencall, which sells wireless mobile phones to British customers and mortgages in the US, is worlds away from the reality of the Kenyan capital.
In a city filled with the honk of impatient buses and the ring of construction hammers, the call center has only a low buzz of conversation and a gentle electronic hum.
Packed with 120 callers, most of them recent university graduates, the center has its own standby generator, and phones the world through its own satellite dish rather than relying on the crumbling public telephone system.
It is part of a burgeoning business in Africa which has brought telesales and enquiries jobs to South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco and Madagascar.
But Africa is still such a call center minnow -- there are only about 54,000 employed on the continent out of a world total of 6 million -- that most customers believe the Kenyan agents must be dialling from India.
"I think they've never heard of a call center in Africa," said Christine Amondi, 30, who studied at secretarial college and hopes to do a law degree.
"Some get very interested when I say I'm calling from Africa, and they start asking about the weather and the animals," she said.
Although most graduates are already fluent in English, there are some obstacles to perfect communication.
Kenyan English is peppered with Swahili words, and the callers must be trained out of this habit.
"When I first started it was very hard not to say words like sawa [OK]," Amondi said. "Like, `I'll phone you tomorrow -- sawa.' The person on the other end will be like, `What have you just said?.'"
There are also pitfalls in the pronunciation of British place names, such as the English town occasionally referred to as "Lie-sesta" (Leicester).
Sometimes a Kenyan pronunciation of a well-known word will sound odd to British ears, as in "Dee-sembah" for the last year of the month.
And after the leisurely courtesies of Africa, European impatience can come as a shock.
"For us Kenyans, even if I don't like you, I'll explain to you why I don't like you," Amondi said.
"But some of the people we speak to don't give us a chance. They are just gone," she said.
The consensus, however, is that Brits are better than Americans when it comes to giving callers a polite brush-off.
"The British tend to say they're sorry," said Christine Nyasae, 25. "They'll say `I'm sorry love, but I'm not interested'. The Americans don't put it as nicely as the British do."
The callers earn about 25,000 Kenyan shillings (US$330) a month, a reasonable wage in a country where most people live on less than US$1 a day.
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