Saturday, March 31, 2007

Corporate Stupidity

We all come across stupidity in our daily life - stupid people, stupid rules, stupid govt, etc etc.
But Corporate stupidity beats everything hands down. I just had a first hand experience of it. For some reason* my mobile service provider decided to cut my outgoing calls. The next day they cut incoming too. Well pissing me off is not a stupid thing to do; that was not the intention of the post anyway.
Its the message I get when I attempt a call:

". . . the outgoing call facility is currently not available on you number. For assistance please call Airtel customer care number 121 . ."

Annoyed that I was, I couldnt help but smile. And yes, I got the same message when I dialled 121, as the sweet voice told me.


* No, I didnt default on my bill. They wanted my address proof, my photo and prepaid sim enrolment form to be submitted to the nearest Airtel showroom. Which I had done when I took the connection, which apparantly they lost, maybe because at that time TRAI was not that strict. Anyway I told them if you want it, come and get it. Seemed fair to me.

4 comments:

Gayatri Bhadran said...

hahaha.. :p

yea.. airtel and hutch are PARANOID (would be an understatement) about security and blah..

i called hutch customer care yesterday.. and the lady who answered overdid her courtesies and kept asking me.. "do you understand ma'm?" (like i was a dumb and brain dead person)

and after i hung up.. i got FOUR SMSES from hutch asking.. "was the call satisfactory? was our customer care executive helpful?"

shoonya said...

i got the same treatment too from hutch when i called up to ask about the gprs rates.

after the call the system started sending smses, after replying to 3 i had enuf and replied back with "go to hell" something. then the system started all over again from the first question. i just stopped replying.


another time [from a hutch customer care number itself] a middle aged guy called up and started speaking in Kannada, i kept asking "what" in English. Somehow in broken English he explained that he was calling from Hutch Customer Care and was my mobile connection ok? I was like "WOW", Did they just move the call center to some village??. I said the connection was fine. He proceeded to ask some more questions in a mix of English & Kannada. I was too shocked already to handle more. I just repeated "What" for a couple of times and hung up.

Sandee said...

thx fr the comments!
btw the customer care fellow fr Hutch told me...
".. i am very much apologising for that sir.. we dont have that offer now.."

KK said...

I am on board completely.. If only people realized how stupid they were!

Because, then, you see, I could pass myself off as a victim-to-fashion, rather than an, the common perception of being a singularly uncommon retard.

On a completely unrelated topic, I lost my cell phone, and hence, you see, face no issues like this.