Nocturnal Poïesis

Okay, so I just finished yelling at an absolute imbecile of an officer - the DGM of broadband, BSNL. Point one - if you are in such a high position, learn to speak English, know the regional language, and do not say "I don't know" so many times to a customer. Point two - speak clearly and do not be drunk/sloshed at 6pm in the evening on a monday.

The fucktards d/c my line on the 19th of june 2009 for non payment of a bill on the that was paid on the 6th of June 2009, in cash. The fuckers were updated on the situation - yeah, their customer has to go to them tell them "Assholes, I have given you money, now give me my connection back". Then they make you do the merry-go-round on the red tape and before you know it, you have a hand full of system codes, no one knows what's going on and the fucking DGM says he does not know anything that it is in "bengalor". Now where that place is, I do not know, last time I heard we had something called "bangalore" which is now called Bengaluru. Now that my broadband is up and running, I am counting my losses.

4 days of non-connectivity - daily loss of approximately 1000-200, so total loss of about 4000-8000.

Update - while I was posting this, the DGM called me up to ask whether it has been reconnected or not. How nice of him. I thanked him and told him I am shifting to Reliance.

Any way, on top of my daily losses, to keep up my clientele, i had to use my mom's GPRS on an emergency basis, it was pasy as you go scheme, so now I have to pay about 2000 for that. So not only did I lose business but I also lost money to ensure that I do not suffer anymore losses.

In the meantime, I was surfing the net at my friend's place for mobile data plans. GPRS, EDGE, 3G, etc. I looked at Vodafone, Airte and Reliance. After half an hour, I did not find what I was looking for but I was updated on on all their partners and all their ringtones and sms services like  astrology. You tech-retards, have you heard of Web-UX? Web user experience? You are turning me off, a potential customer, who sadly has no time to go to three different customer care places just to pick up data plan charts. To show my friend what design should be like, I tried the international websites. Vodafone UK came up first. good enough. Went to it - there was everything any could need, plus entry in to the user account. And after banner ads, there was room to spare on the main page. Very pleasing experience.

On the Indian sites, the whole screen is filled, more or less, with useless shit. And nothing you want is easily accessible. The CalTel website has to be the worst designed site, but at least it is filled with useful links to things you want to know, if you can decipher the departmental code that the charts are written in. They expect normal customers to understand their inter-departmental abbreviations. Superb.

But at least I can find what I am looking for. Which is more than what I can say for the other websites. Listen, Web Devs at Reliance, Airtel and Vodafone India, you are in the communications business, you are fucking meant to communicate. So get a three year old and he/she will have a better data and click flow up and running than you ass holes have. Useless pieces of shit. Hire me, I am a copywriter and I understand a thing or two about UI design. I have to go through enough badly designed customer sites to know what can go wrong. And stop getting paid, you are definitely failing spectacularly at your job.

And to top this of, here's what an useless, brain dead client can do to you - you submit large assignment aropund mid day on friday. You get no response of whether he got it or not, nothing about whether his brain blew up at the pressure of writing one line in email. On saturday, after you've sent him a mail, he says his proofreaders don't work on weekends. Oh, and friday is a weekend on which calendar?

So you wait way past midday on monday comes his reponse, all passed except one. Why? Oh because the topic was wrong. Damn, how did you go wrong so badly? well, your client thinks it is 'partially' his side's fault. Heave forbid! Why? Oh... nothing serious... he did not clarify the topic on the list he gave you... nothing major. The topic was a dead president and the city where he was killed. Just two words. What is the actual topic? A 'MEMORIAL' to the dead president IN the city. Oh damn, you are so supposed to understand that from that topic. Mind reading, via a digital document on the internet. and what does he call this? "Could you please revise it?" Fucker, do you even know what the word "revision" means? You are asking me to write an entirely new article!

So yeah, perfect weekend and start of the week. To top of it off, private life has also gone for a salad tossing competition. Hooray for life. Oh, if you feel like venting, please feel free to comment. If you feel like you know of a reliable broadband connection in Kolkata (relaly?!), do comment. If you want to advice, ask annoying questions, get prepared to be published and trolled back. Especially if you choose to do it within the next 6 hours or so.