Fast forward

From yesteryears fast forward to the ITized world. From the 50's to 00's following items moved away from luxury to necessity in a household.

Bicycle, Transistor radio, Watch, Music system, Refrigerator, Two wheeler, Mixie, Grinder, Telephone, Apartment, Microwave oven, Air-conditioner, Independent house, Four wheeler, Desktop PC, Broadband connection, Notebooks/Laptop/Blackberry. Cell phone had direct entry to necessity category without going through the luxury phase.

Similarly in an office, airconditioners, PCs, carpets and LED displays started appearing. The ubiquitous of these is a PC in front of every desk. In the early days the physical size of the PC was directly proportional to one's designation. Today it is inversely proportional.

It is ironical yet true, I feel most disgusted when I see services getting ITized. "Computerized" is a less dignified term. The jump into IT systems has happened without adequate preparation. I go to pay insurance for my vehicle. I am told that the systems are down and they don't know when the systems will come up, that I can go to another branch if I like. I was adamant in staying back and said that I did not mind the delay. The expert arrived a little later and found that the servers were not switched on !! They sport an ISO 9001 certificate for process culture.

I go to a bank to get my passbook updated but either the network is down or the passbook printer is down. If they have 4 passbook printers why can't they have a fifth as a cold standby?

I remember the early years when Indian Airlines used to do the reservation on the system and write out the ticket manually because printing the ticket was deferred to Phase II of ITization !!

Railways did better except that due to an error in the RAC processing logic, the family members were split into different bogies.

The Water Authority will ask for the consumer number and all details like name, address etc. every time and enter. Nobody knew that with the consumer number as the "key" the other details could be retrieved from the disk and printed on the receipt. When I tried to tell them so, they would not listen because the World Bank appointed experts had not told them to operate in this way !! The only change the computer brought about for them was replacement of the pen with the keyboard and the messy carbon sheet interspersed receipt writing with the printer.

To this day I have not figured out how to see my BSNL bill details through the Net.
Can someone help?

The most painful tyranny inflicted on the consumer is the ultimate in modern technology - the 1-800 number syndrome for lodging customer complaints.

Press 1 for Hindi, 2 for English......
Press 1 for queries, 2 for sale, 3 for complaints...........
Press 1 for warranty, 2 for AMC and 3 for ...........
....
....
Sorry, we are available only from 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday.

In the absence of any other way to establish communication, you wait till Monday, register the complaint, wait till Friday because nothing had happened, get back to "1-800, Press 1 for ...." drill and you are told that your complaint has been attended to. No way to convince the operator because the system says that the case is closed and systems don't lie. If you want you can register a fresh complaint. Again no one has turned up, but there is a call from the agency asking for the feedback on the service. When I said that there has been no service so far, the canned reply comes out "Thank you for your valuable feedback madam" ( I am used to people using "Sir" in place of "Madam", this is the first instance I heard "Madam" being used in place of "Sir")

The canned reply phrase tempts me to document an experience on Indian Airlines. Avro flight from Mumbai to Ahmedabad (ETD 6 PM) started late at 7 PM and after a turbulent flight neared the destination only to be told that the runway lights are not functioning and that we should go back to Mumbai. Again it started at 1045 PM and halfway to Ahmedabad had to return because of very bad weather. When the weather cleared, the duty timing of the crew was over and we had to await a fresh crew. Finally we landed at Ahmedabad at 7 AM , late by 12 hours and spending allthe time inside the aircraft or on the departure lounge. The whole aircraft exploded with laughter and booing when the steward repeated the canned announcement "Aasha hai ki aapki yatra sukhad rahi" .,... " Hope you had a pleasant flight". I could understand because in public sector, improvisation is frowned upon".