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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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Recently, I made the terrible mistake of choosing IndiGo to travel from New Delhi to Mumbai. I can only hope that these people learn to respect english language, professionalism and customer service. If you are a frequent flier (not necessarily IndiGo), I’m sure you understand what I mean when I say “english language”. Thanks to these kind of air travel operators, the connotation of phrases like “last and final” has taken a big hit. In my childhood days, a “last and final” warning from my teacher was like a matter of life and death. Nowadays, the same phrase sounds like a ridicule. The fact that IndiGo crew makes at least 20 last and final boarding calls before giving green signal to a flight testifies this more than anything. Due to this extreme act of “customer service” by IndiGo, my flight which was scheduled to take off at 0615 hrs actually took off at 0650, hence making me get stuck in the deadly Mumbai traffic, the very thing I was looking to avoid by taking an early morning flight. That half an hour, totally wasted by an ignorant firm for some over-ignorant passengers, made me vow never to fly IndiGo again. I was pissed off big time!

My second example of “people who piss me off” actually arises from the first example. These are the “ignorant passengers” who think that they have all the time in the world when they get inside an airplane and start putting their luggage into the overhead cabins. I despise those passengers who are not mindful of the fact that they are blocking the way for fellow passengers. They also fail to realize that their lousiness also adds to the time the plane is going to take to get ready before taking off. Sad cases!

My third example is from my office premises. For some people, the biggest happiness in life is to disturb others with their stupid cellphone ringtones. They think that they are doing a great service to mankind by making people aware of the newest and latest kinds of ringtones in the market. Sadly, they fail to recognize that there are people around them who are really serious about their work and do not like to be disturbed. The worst part is, when Mr. X’s phone rings with its stupid and creaky ringtone for the first time, the whole group looks at him surprisingly, he mistakes the scorn with attention and does not put his instrument into silent mode. Either this, or that he does not know that there is something called a silent mode in cellphones. I hope its the former, because that makes him less dumber!

My fourth example is a general one. Since the time I am staying out of my hometown, I have shared space with plenty and variety of people. I am a person who likes a level of privacy and mannerism, even if it is with the best and closest friend. I get absolutely pissed off if someone tries to use/uses my stuff without permission. And if I need to use someone else’s stuff, I make sure that I return it to him/her in the same condition in which I borrowed. But some people just do not understand the concept of private property. I will not take any names here, but there was a person whom I stayed with (say Mr. Y). He was obsessed with using my slippers, sneakers, shirts, T-shirts. If at any time I did not find them in my room, his room was the place to look for. And this continued till I did not talk to him clearly. Thankfully, I did not have to stay with him for long.

Today I was watching a repeat telecast of Roadies 6 first task-episode. The 10 people who were selected as safe contained both the dumbest guy and the dumbest gal (obviously my opinion). Maybe MTV’s crew believes that not letting dumb people go increases their TRP. Increase or no increase is not my headache, but hats off to their tolerance!

Other people who piss me off do not even do anything too different to be worth a mention here. As they say, some people are alive only because it is illegal to shoot them.

I think I will keep updating this post as and when I come across more people who deserve a mention here.

My heart goes out to the people who have similar experiences.

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Sachin Tendulkar spoilt us. He commanded that we sit in front of the television sets. He ensured we got late with homework, he took care of our lunch-break discussions. He was not all that much older than us, and some of us naïve schoolboys thought we would achieve similar feats when we were 16. We got to 16 and continued to struggle with homework.

Hats off Siddhartha, for a commendable articulation! Keep up the awesome work!

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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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I moved to Mumbai in July last year. I was highly relieved and excited when I found that unlike most of my peers, I would be spending next couple of years at a place other than Bangalore. I have a terrible experience struggling with the mismanaged transport infrastructure of Bangalore during my internship time. The city lacks subways, and one can rarely cross a street without getting stranded for minutes.

I must mention that the relief I talked about was not unfounded. I visited Mumbai for 5 days in September 2003 for the Aditya Birla Scholarships interview. Though I did not get much time to roam around, that visit reinforced the cosmopolitan image of Mumbai I had my mind. While travelling from the railway station to the destination and back, the weather and the path made it feel exactly like the movie scenes where the lead is travelling in a cool town in his open jeep. The only place we visited out of our way was Gateway of India (well, not exactly “out of the way”; we stayed in The Taj). I left the city wanting to come back and have a better look around soon.

Ironically, it saddens me to realize that I now work and stay in Mumbai. Sixteen months into it, I have found that the city is nowhere near the “Mumbai” I experienced in my first trip. Well, a lot of things still attract me, and will always do. But if I leave these “fascinations” aside, I dare say that everything else about this city is screwed up. Yes, in the real sense of the word!

Picture this:

7:00 AM. Wake up. Check email. Internet not working. Bah.

7:30 AM. Wake up call from Mom. Start talking. Call gets dropped after 20 seconds. Huh.

8:00 AM. Watch news channels. Read newspaper. Someone broke something in town yesterday. Someone is doing something about it. All the same. Crib. Show me the NEWs!

9:00 AM. Get ready for office. Fortunately everything is in order in the bath. Yay!

9:35 AM. Auto-rickshaws not on strike. Relief. Hunt for an empty one.

9:40 AM. Could not find an empty one. Curse mankind for over-population. Start walking towards office.

9:45 AM. Walked nearly 1 km. Pity the godforsaken roads. Finally found an auto. Thank God. Yippee!

9:50 AM. Stuck in traffic jam. Half road blocked due to construction. Vehicles parked carelessly on the other half. Curse mankind again. Curse yourself. Curse everyone. No point. Wait and watch.

10:00 AM. Somehow manage to reach office on time. Thank God.

2:00 PM. Feel like eating outside today. Come out. Get wet – either due to heavy rain or due to sultry sun. Crib. Return. Eat random office meal.

9:00 PM. Reach home. Check mail. Net working dead slow. Try calling Mom. Network strength weak. Wait.

9:15 PM. Try calling Mom again. Connects this time. Voice breaking. Crib. Get frustrated. Bid an early good night. Have dinner.

10:00 PM. Net crawling. Takes minutes to open mail account. Curse. Curse. Curse.

To sum up, no network connectivity on Vodafone phone, crawling Tata Indicom “broadband”, broken roads, no traffic management, overcrowded local trains – all in all, a total infrastructure breakdown.

Would you want to stay in a “financial capital” that offers you this kind of a lifestyle? And, above all, costs you more than Rs. 15 thousand per month?

I have to. And many others.

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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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“You’re fired !! “

“You’re hired !!”

Do these phrases sound familiar? If the answer is yes, then you are most likely one of the two:

1. A fan of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.
2. Related to finance industry.

Donald Trump made these words (hired and fired) somewhat common in my life, but at the end of it all, its a competition and only one will win. So its fine – I was assured in some sense that real life is not that dynamic and risky. But, finance industry surely defies that.

As a “child”, I always thought of a full-time job as a secure, constant and satisfying source of income. I was wrong. These two words are more commonplace around me than they ever were, and I guess are for many of my friends. Unlike most of my classmates at IIT, I had opted against higher studies after my Bachelors so that I get a “feel” of the corporate world. I think I have got much more than what I was looking for!! (Yeah, trust me, I work(ed) with Lehman Brothers)

The idea of writing this post is the amazement – the words “hired” and “fired” have become so common that any emotional attachment to a financial firm is impossible. Till few months back, I used to attach immense emotion to these two phrases. But the finance industry in the last few weeks has changed all that. Perhaps, this is what they call “growing up”. Things just change too rapidly. I need not say a word about what happened on the wall street in the last month, because either it will be news, or speculation – either of which will be unnecessary. Firms having history of tens and hundreds of years collapsed in days, managements got restructured like crazy, businesses got shut, thousands went jobless, stock markets tumbled etc. Too much for a mortal to swallow.

I touched upon the emotional attachment aspect because I was involved in a big project which was used by almost every person in my team. One fine Monday morning, I find that all my work will be just a piece of code in a few days. On a personal note, I was going to part with a work on which I spent an year, and I was emotionally attached to. On a practical note, I was one of many thousands whose hard work of years was about to fall flat. Thankfully, now that Lehman’s assets have been bought by Barclays and Nomura, I am sure that my work will not go waste, even if I am no longer associated with any of these entities. Not that I do not want to, but anyway, that’s another discussion.

The post may feel incomplete, but I do not have anything else to say. Too many things going on in mind. I got to finish some critial tasks before I get to hear “You’re fired.”

You never know, it could be tomorrow !

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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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