Monday, July 14, 2008

Caution: Wire crossing

You know you're in Bangalore when the telephone department makes careful distinctions between dead and half-dead. When you call the "telephone faults" number, these are your options:
Dial 1 if your phone is completely dead
Dial 2 if you have partial service
Dial 3 for instrument fault
Dial 4 for something else
Dial 5 for broadband fault

If you can diagnose it, they will treat it. There is no option to transfer to a call centre agent.

It only takes a few minutes (once you're done calling the number five times just to laugh) to realise it’s a good method. These options cover the most common problems. And if you have any other sort of complaint, it's probably serious enough for you to storm their offices with a large stick. This way they've ensured that our irate dads only do the stick and storming bit for the big problems instead of twice a week.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What if they are keeping our irate dads happy by introducing small faults now and then, and fixing them immediately? That would be very very cunning - I think they've been beaten enough to have adapted this complex survival trait.

Gargoyle said...

So much evolution has not happened in the three years since you had a telephone here. They've come up to the "If It's Asleep, Don't Wake It" level.

Gargoyle said...

Their cunning ploys don't always work though. Yesterday I saw a scene that is familiar to us all - an irate dad looking in the telephone directory at midnight for the home number of the Director of Telecom or Minister of State for it or Prime Minister or something. Whoever it was got an earful about the broadband not working. It's fine now.

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