We got a wireless router for our internet connection. After you pay a hefty price for it, they make you buy the router - nothing is free in India. It cost about 20 euros.
We soon discovered that said router would not work across the flat - which is less that 50 square meters! From my work station, I'd only get a feeble signal, or none at all.
We call the customer service, and the first time someone came who didn't speak one word of English; he changed the router, replacing the old with a new, identical one. Obviously the problem remained. We could not get the message across, even with my best attempts at explaining the situation in Hindi.
Today, someone else showed up. A young boy. No ID whatsoever. How can you tell it's someone from Airtel and not a passer-by is another matter.
He scientifically assessed the situation, and concluded: the router doesn't work because there are walls in this house.
Marvelous. Walls. The problem is walls.
After seeing our faces, he added: Airtel only sells Beetel routers, and they don't work in a different room. To get a strong signal all over your property you need to purchase a Netgear routers.
We asked (drooling with rage): so why the fuck did your installation engineer (engineer being the operative term for whoever handles tools and wires in this country) tell us that this piece of shit would work, and made us pay for it?
What followed was half an hour of discussion involving physics, management, contract breach, various gods being called various names.
Airtel cannot do anything about it. It sells you a product that will not work. If you want it to work, you have to shell out some more money and buy a new router.
The myth of India as a cheap country is, well, a myth. Nothing is ever cheap here. You have to pay 3, 5, 10 times to have things to work just fine. You have to call people, shout at people, accept the fact that service engineers will show up while you are having dinner only to fiddle around with a few cables. You have to know that whatever you buy will break, you will have to bring it back, try to get it repaired under warranty only to discover that the warranty was fake.
Best of luck to the people (the husband!)who are trying to develop business between India and the West.
Best business between Western World and India?
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this I can only say "nuke 'em all!"
And to think we've let 10 million of these people into the U.S. to take jobs. And continue to let in close to 130,000 more every single month.
ReplyDeleteAnd we wonder why the U.S. economy is in trouble?
It's India, stupid.