It’s hardly been 3 months since I moved to the US, and I think I have experienced the worst “customer care” of my life. The companies in question include Chase, PSE&G, Comcast etc. My experiences with Chase totally deserve a dedicated blog post, which I will definitely write at some point in time.

Fonolo brings into my mind a question about how businesses evolve nowadays.
1) Some business minds get together, start a company.
2) Slowly as the company grows, the need for a good customer service through telephone increases.
3) As days pass by, you have to have more and more elaborate “customer care” menus on the customer care phonelines, and to “help” out customers reach the right people “easily”.
4) A time comes when innocent customers start getting pissed off because they have to spend 10-15 mins navigating those stupid menus when they exactly know whom they want to talk to, but your menu cannot take them there.
5) Some frustrated minds out of them get together, and start a company like Fonolo.
6) There you are! Go to step 2. Enjoy!

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Anyway, this post is not about Mr. Trump or any of his businesses. This is about the good, the poor, and the warning email forwards that we get everyday. While I adore the good forwards (of course the sender needs to be a sound judge of what a good forward means), I absolutely detest the bad ones and treat them with the same disdain with which I treat spam, and the senders as spammers. The idea of this post did not just appear from nowhere – this post is inspired by a forward from a good friend.

Filtering email forwards is an art. And it takes some time and experience to master this art. I believe I am sort of good at it, because I regularly get praises from my friends for the emails I forward. (Hence proving that I am qualified enough to write this post ).

So what makes a good forward? Or what makes a bad forward? The simplest possible answer I can think of is that a forward is good if it is going to help even a single person involved in the whole activity. As I explain in the rest of the post, a bad forward is a liability to everyone involved, and is a sheer wastage of valuable resources (barring a few seconds of baseless satisfaction to the sender). Examples of good forwards include ones which share a good joke, or an information that is not available otherwise, or anything that can help anyone. The words “good”, “information” here tend to be more subjective than objective, and, as I mentioned earlier, the sender needs to have a sound judgement of these things.

The whole act of forwarding starts out as a fascination right from the time you create an email address of your own. Initially, it gives the sender immense satisfaction to send out a bunch of pictures of flowers, or a bunch of Santa Banta cliches to the entire list of contacts. These days, most of the the internet users are blunt enough to immediately warn the sender with a WTF message. On the other hand, if you are aware of the naivety of the sender and do not want to hurt him/her, you peacefully apply a corresponding filter and hope that the sender will realize his/her foolishness in due course of time.

I would like to spend some words discussing the types of forwards and their ramifications. The first kind is the one containing a lot of images of flowers, cars, balloons, .. and anything under the sun you could think of. The emails lack information, contain nothing new, and are perhaps the most annoying emails ever created. With a plethora image search tools available to the internet community, these kinds of emails are rejected by the sender immediately. And since the email contains a lot of images, it is far heavier than normal text emails. The end result – an utter waste of sender’s and receiver’s bandwidth, an utter misuse of world wide web network usage, and a sheer misuse of the email provider’s data servers. Moreover, it pisses the receiver like anything.

The second kind – contain PPT or PPS attachments preaching endless things about how life should be lived. These may be tolerable to some receivers, but excess of this will piss anyone off. Again, the size of attachment can be comparable to a set of images, leading to a lot of resource wastage in the end.

The third kind, and I love to write about this kind – are the unforgettable CHAIN mails. Thousands of internet users must have ranted about these mails. How on earth can an email decide the number of people it should be forwarded to, the amount of good luck that is going to come into my life, the number of days I am going to have that luck, and so on. Give me a break!

The fourth kind – are written to bring out the emotional front of you, by stating that someone is in dire need of something, and every email you send will fetch him/her some money. It has been more than a decade since I have been using email, and getting these kind of forwards, but not once have I seen any proof of anyone benefiting even a single penny out of them. As far as I know, it is illegal for mail providers to track emails sent/received by you. So how can anyone know how many people I sent it to, and how much money to credit to the innocent guy’s account? Crap !

The fifth (and the last one I have in mind at present) kind seem to be informative at the first look. They share information – information which puts you in a dillemma. You cannot trust the mail, and you cannot ignore the mail. Put very simply, the email will try to tell you some life-threatening (alleged) truths about some things. And since they are life threatening, you would want to believe them, but since they do not come from a reliable source, you would want to ignore them. Even though I am sure you got what I mean here, I will leave you with an example of such an email from a friend (which is the inspiration of this post as I mentioned earlier) and will let you decide for yourself what you want to do with such mails. I am also going to include the reply that I sent to his email.

The email:

Hi All,,

1) Don’t put your mobile closer to your ears until the recipient answers, Because directly after dialing, the mobile phone would use it’s maximum signaling power, which is: 2watts = 33dbi. Please Be Careful. Please use left ear while using cell (mobile), because if you use the right one it may affect brain directly. This is a true fact from Apollo medical team.

2) Do not drink APPY FIZZ . It contains cancer causing agent.

3) Don’t eat Mentos before or after drinking Coke or Pepsi coz the person will die immediately as the mixture becomes cyanide. Please fwd to whom u care

4) Don’t eat kurkure because it contains high amount of plastic if U don’t Believe burn kurkure n u can see plastic melting. Please forward to all!!!!!!!!!!! News report from Times of India

5) Avoid these tablets as they are very dangerous
* D cold
* Vicks action- 500
* Actified
* Coldarin
* Co some
* Nice
* Nimulid
* Cetrizet-D

They contain Phenyl- Propanol -Amide PPA.Which Causes strokes, and these tablets are banned in U.S.

6) Cotton Ear Buds… (Must read it) Please do not show sympathy to people selling buds on roadside or at Signals….. Just wanted to warn you people not to buy those packs of ear buds you get at the roadside. It’s made from cotton that has already been used in hospitals. They take all the dirty, blood and pus filled cotton, wash it, bleach it and use it to make ear buds. So, unless you want to become the first person in the world to get Herpes Zoster Oticus (a viral infection of the inner, middle, and external ear) of the ear and that too from a cotton bud, DON’T BUY THEM! Please forward to all this may be helpful for someone……….. Please forward to all your near and dear ones….!

My reply:

As is usual with such mails, some of the information in this mail is not true. You should verify and ask for sources whenever you come across such extremist information. We like to believe these, because the mail talks about life-threatening stuff and we want to live long. . But if these are false, we might be missing out on some of the best things in life, like Kurkure

1) The signalling power bit might be correct.  But no evidence or technical information is available to support it. Regarding left and right ears, I found this. Again, no evidence.

2) Appy Fizz : I like it and I consume it a lot. I am not sure about the cancer info, so I believe it for now, for obvious reasons. But I am constantly looking for evidence/proof of this.

3) Mentos and Coke : I have seen the videos showing the mind blowing effect of reaction of mentos with coke. But I am not sure what happens if they react inside the body or after digestion. But again, I would like to believe it, for now. You might want to read this.

4) Kurkure : Again, I love Kurkure. So I am certainly going to try this out! Interested in the fun experiment?

5) Out of these, I only use D-Cold. I know that Vicks Action 500 is not okay. I want to find the truth about D-Cold.

6) Thumb rule : Never ever buy anything from street vendors ! I trust Johnson & Johnson . You might want to read this.

Also see this.

What do you think? How was my reply?

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Being a widely used web portal of good repute, I do not see any reason why you should allow blunders like the following to happen, especially on the homepage! Moreover, earlier, I had observed this.

A suffering surfer

Pawan Jain

Rediff homepage spelling mistake

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The first thing I did after going home yesterday(which was today early morning actually), was to reduce the number of labels in my GMail account. I have been able to come down from 57 to 15 !! I guess I will reduce them further. I planned to remove all of them, and start afresh. But since GMail does not allow you to delete more than one label simultaneously (perhaps they assume that no one would be crazy enough to have as many as 57 labels!, which is a reasonable assumption by all means), I started deleting them one by one. I was tempted to keep quite a few of them intact – labels which I actually use and labels which I would want to have.

Anyways, removing redundant things is always good. Moving towards Pareto efficiency in life?

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I have a knack of subscribing to numerous newsletters and then having a separate label for that in GMail, blogs in Google Reader, joining uncountable communities in orkut etc etc. To make matters worse, there is no restriction anymore on any such number in any case. I remember the times when I just opened a yahoo mail account (in 2003), it had only 50 MB of space, and allowed to create only 16 filters. Things have come a long long way. Not having these restrictions has made things totally disorganized for me. And I know I hate it.

Occasionally I do clean up my bed, almirah etc, but that’s because I spend a lot more time with them as compared to my online over-piled stuff. Well, today after a long time I was reading some posts in my Google Reader. Thankfully, I have started cleaning up stuff. Over time, my pile of subscriptions had grown to 97 in number, and I know that I follow only 5-6 blogs regularly. All the others just got subscribed as a result of my habit of keeping things with me whenever I come across anything. After a lot of filtering, I am finally down to 31. Things look a lot cleaner now!

I just counted that I have 57 labels in my GMail account. Would you believe that?

I am surely going to make a conscious effort towards leaving this habit. SOON.

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Though I have almost grown past my latter habit, it is almost impossible to leave the former one. When I am reading a web page, I have this habit of selecting words as I read. Since a double-click also selects a word, I double click a lot – on crucial words, or otherwise – but a lot.

Believe it or not, even while watching a movie (using VLC usually), I keep fiddling with my mouse. If you know me, you must be aware that it is really hard for me to sit alone and finish a 2 hour movie in 2 hours. I get bored easily and start surfing the net. At other times, I am busy with my mouse doing all sorts of things – including double clicking which toggles the full screen mode.

I have not had any problems with my habit, but of late new generation websites have emerged which consider themselves to be “over-smart”, to a level to make the user insane. I am talking about these double-click pop-ups of all kinds which come up when you double click anywhere on the site.

So, while reading, I keep getting unwanted dictionary definitions of the words I happen to double-click inadvertently. Now this is really annoying. The good part is, it will make me get rid of my “mouse fiddling” habit one day.

(I hope by the time you are reading this, blogger does not come up with this strategy!!)

You can see one such web page here.

By the way, have you visited this? (Click at your own risk, do not curse me later )

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“We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of The Astrological Magazine will cease with the December 2007 issue.”

Can you appreciate what I am trying to show here?

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Need I say more?

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