Insanity Rediscovered

And my rantings is that I want the things to change. I am not looking for alternatives that most of the people seem to provide. I just want to start an online war against the companies that don’t do their duties well. I started with Sify Broadband; I am still fighting with them. Next in the line seems to be Airtel. But I am not entirely hopeful considering the consumer satisfaction revolutions have yet to start in this country. There are loads of examples where wars can be fought… Some that comes to mind:

1. Reliance: Poor service and faulty billing
2. Zee Dish TV: Poor Service and pathetic Cable TV Operators
3. BSNL*: Slow repairs, poor voice quality
4. I & B ministry: Where the hell are cheaper and better cable services?
5. Indian Cricket Team: Where are the wins?
6. Software companies*: How do you think we can pay for legal softwares?
7. Government: Where is safe drinking water?
8. Cola Companies*: How safe is the cola drink?
9. Movie Halls*: A family movie outing for 1000 bucks. Are we in America ?
10. Apple*: Why cannot I dream of owning a Mac someday?
11. Maruti: How long will you keep selling the unsafe boxes on wheels? (Omni)

The list can go on and on and on… and posts with (*) are something that relates to me

Ok, yeah the world has moved on to Reliance and their ultra cool cheap CDMA services (with faulty billing if I may add). But I am unfortunately still stuck on Airtel Prepaid connection. And most of my purchases of the recharge coupons depend upon the short time based schemes when they offer full calling value on the bought recharge coupons. But last week they kind of tricked me into losing around 150 bucks worth of calling value!

All this month I had been getting this short message on the mobile that all the second recharges in the month of July will be giving full calling value, provided both the charges were of above 350 bucks! Well good enough. It so happened that I had to get my card recharged fro the second time in the month last week (30th July) and I was pretty happy that I will get the full calling value on my second recharge (both were of 1080 bucks). But well, it came out as a shocker as my card was only recharged by 850 bucks as against expected 1000 bucks. The dealer had no idea what the issue was, so I had to try the next best thing… the Airtel customer support. The phone number of which was inaccessible for full 24 hours that day! When i was finally able to connect through, I get this answer. The scheme was pulled back on the 27th so I was not eligible for the benefits.

Well, I never get messages which indeed matters to me in the end. Because Airtel decided to pull back the scheme by 3 days, I was fooled into believing that I will be able to get benefited from it.

Hmm… So it is just 180 bucks. But well the point is all about the inconsistencies! If they retract a scheme, they should as and well make sure everyone concerned should get to know about it!

I was amazed to read simple things that web developers ignore when developing websites which hampers the usability of the projects in the Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. And the ideas it generated in my mind applies to everything I see in my daily life. And one such incident happened today when I went to my Bank’s ATM Machine…

ATM Machines are replacing Cash Counters in a big way in India. And I have been used to using ATMs so much that I shiver at the thought of visiting a real bank branch to conduct business. So, well I believe ATM Machines are some of the best examples where usability should be totally applied on. I would not go into the basic details because the workings of the ATMs I see in India are very unfriendly to new people and it will take pages of rants. But I noticed a very basic flaw today when one of the 2 machines in the Sector 11 ICICI Bank Branch, Panchkula refused to accept my Debit Card. The problem was the error message it displayed. It was only in 1 language! And the language was Punjabi. Boy that was weird. I remember the first time I noticed the 3rd language option (for Punjabi) to chose from the ATM menu, the first time I used an ATM Machine after shifting to Chandigarh (it was the same bank branch…). And they do still have the 3 language choosing options on the login (whatever!) screen. But the error message it showed when I inserted my card was only in 1 language. That was bad.

Accepted Punjabi is a pretty common language around here. But ATMs should be universal. People travel long distances to conduct business (or for pleasure) carrying little else but plastic money. And if the machines they have to interact with are not even displaying the most common universal languages (English in general and Hindi for India), it calls for some error corrections!

And the bright spot after that pita was that the gentleman who was using the machine next to mine had his card stuck inside the ICICI ATM machine. With no particular reason! No, he did not insert a wrong PIN Number 3 times, in fact he just took out a bunch of Mahatma Gandhis (for the un-iniated 500 rupee notes!) and after exiting, the card did not come out!

Bollocks.

The only help he could get from the security guard was that he would have to wait for Monday morning to contact the people inside the bank to get his card back.

Dude, better be careful the next time you insert that card into an ICICI ATM Machine!

And please do not suggest me to switch banks. ICICI has the most accessible (in terms of the numbers) ATMs so; I had rather have my cash out with my card stuck than have no cash at all in cases of emergencies!

I keep track of quite a few Blogs. And the recent trend I see is most of the guys just post (copy paste more so) stuff about the latest happenings in the tech world (getting a GMail account was hot sometime back) or simply don’t Blog. And one of the biggest surprises was Jivha. I don’t know the guy/gal who managed it, but it was one hell of an active Blog. And now it’s down. Not down as my original Blog is. Down as in pulled down by the owner. Just like that!

Is blogging getting boring? Is the fun dying down? Well, there are lots of Blogs out there that defy the concept. But well, when heavy weight bloggers stop, you get an eerie feeling.

Last 10 days have been so happening that I have lost the sense of time passing by. What day is it today? 20th already! It seems like yesterday I left my old job. A lot has happened since then. Have so much on my hand with so little being done that I better start worrying about not getting any free time in the near future which would definitely be a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, it means there is a possibility I can make it through alone for at least the near future. Why cares about a year or so ahead when you do not know whether you will be alive or not tomorrow!

On the weird side, anyone of you think the new Esteem looks a lot like the old Honda City? I felt so! And god, when will GM launch Chevrolet Spark in India. I am dying to see that car on the road again.