India in 2019, summarized

Over the years, I have seen all kinds of experts trying to summarize the political situation in India into a few minutes. And failed. This is a big year for India. And trying to explain it to an outsider is a futile attempt. Until I saw this.

Happy 140th birthday, Einstein

Albert Einstein was born 140 years ago. Yes. He lived over a century ago. And his ideas continue to inspire and question us today. And will continue to. Probably the most influencial figure in science today.

In 1900, Einstein's paper "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena") was published in the journal Annalen der Physik.On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis,with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. As a result, Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zürich, with his dissertation "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions".

In that same year, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world, at the age of 26.

Australia’s consumer protection

Having lived in India all my life, there are things I got used to. Like dodgy customer service. You know, when you buy a product or service from the market, and it does not work as intended. Or when you place an order for something, and it does not get delivered on time. Over the years, I noticed private companies upping the quality of their customer service, public companies never cared. Ever rising competition between private companies, with the need to retain customers, and the risk of receiving ‘negative reviews’ in the era of social media, all led to private sellers trying to resolve their customer’s complaints.   This was unheard of a few decades back, when national television used to air public service announcements about consumer rights, and consumer courts. I just sort of assumed that the problem was India being a ‘developing’ nation, and such problems are not to be found in developed countries.

How wrong I was.

Australia is an eye opener. In terms of customer service and consumer rights, I think they are a few years behind. The people at sales counters are extremely cheerful, of course. IBut once they have made their sale, it falls back to ‘its-somebody-elses-problem’ mode. And this is one of those areas where reality lags expectations.

In India, larger companies run 7 day call centers. Some even 24/7, specially telecom , banks and travel companies. Surprisingly , most Australian businessess run only a 5 working day service on the weeks. And strictly 8am to 5pm. For after hours services, they have a voice mail system , where you could leave messages for them to service later. So if your rental car breaks down, you are on your own. Of if you want to know when your phone will be disconnected, you have to wait for them to respond to your email.

But the problem I think most consumers here are going to be unhappy about , is online orders.

I recently placed an order for a water filter, to be used on the tap on a kitchen sink. Such things are still expensive in this country, and the best deals are online.  The company is called truwater, and I think they are just resellers of products, and have no inventory of their own. I made the online payment, and the amount was promptly deducted from my account. The product was to shipped to my address in 1 week. But I failed to get it delivered even after 2 weeks. Finally, I made the call to their (non-existant) customer service line.

It went to voice mail.

I even emailed them. No response.

After 1 month of initial order placement, they finally reponded that they were facing issues with their supplier. And that the order will be delayed. Further.

I called them up, and this time somebody picked up.

I politely told them to cancel my order.  I was promplty told it cannot be done.

I then rudley asked for order cancellation. Out of the question. The lady  told me I would get an order update within a week.

So now is 5 weeks after order placement.

I decided to slow down. It was a water filter, after all.

But after 7 weeks, I was still told that the order would be further delayed.

I tried to contact someone via social media, or linked in. Tried various channels. And none worked.

Frustrated, I finally decided to google the one place that could help me. I googled:

“Australia consumer protection”

Turns out, Australia has a different consumer rights authority in each of its states. Since I was dealing with an NSW company, I ended up at the website if NSW Fairtrading.

After reading all their site documentation, I finally decided I qualified to raise an complaint with them.

I uploaded all my emails, and proof of payment. And stated my problem in detail. I guess they gave the company a call. Because my order was shipped the same week. And I received it the next monday !

I later had to call NSW Fairtrading to update them, and to close my complaint.

Thats all it took. A little nudge. And the bad boys had to oblige.  In the course of my investigation, I had found that lots of customers had faced a similiar issues with truwater.

Check Australia’s consumer rights site here. This page shows the small claims tribunal of all states.

So there you go. Before placing any online order with any unheard of company down under, look up their service review. And if they refuse to deliver, or to reverse payment, promply call up the fair trading onbudsman, or consumer protection group of that state.

Don’t wait. Customer service here is still in its nascent stages. But you do have rights.

School gave me a bad handwriting

 

The other day, I had to participate in a class room training. Nothing good comes when a room full of grown-ups are asked to behave like children. Then are given chartpapers, sticky notes, and sharpies, and asked to come up with ideas. This particular session I was mandated to be in, was about design thinking. I thought that fad was over and out. Turns out, upper management still likes doing these kind of trainings and sessions.

Pretty soon, I was asked to scribble and draw on our group-acitivity sheet. And that is my ugly secret came out.

I have bad handwriting. Like, really really bad. Sometimes I have trouble reading my own writing. Its a miracle I have made it so far in my career, with people having to decipher my scribblings.

But here is a fact. At one point, I actually had nice, legible writing. The letters were evenly spaced, and even those with bad eye sight could read my writing. This was upto class..hmm…6 or 7 ? In fact, I had such good handwriting, that I was routinely asked to write on school charts, and whiteboards. I used to gleam with pride and joy whenever I was whisked away from class to write a section in the monthly notice board chart. I considered it the only gift I had, the gift of good writing.

And then, it all came tumbling down. And it was not my fault. You see, I was still writing in what was called ‘block letters’. This is the style one finds today on whiteboards, where each letter is separated and clear and legible in a word. The pen/sharpie is lifted after every letter.

It was not cursive writing. Cursive is the style when the pen is lifted only after every word, and all the letters in each words are connected. Like this:

 

I know , I know, this looks better. Brings in a sophistication, like its written by a Post Graduate in English. Like a Duke or Prince. Got it. Well I did not write like that. And some-one in my school decided that this was the only way to write. And that henceforth, every student had to write like this. In what they called ‘running letters’. What the hell is that ?

We were all given cursive writing books, you know, with those dotted sentences already printed, and asked to write over those letters. This was intended to ‘improve’ our ‘writing’. Also, it was supposedly faster, as the writer saves all those precious micro-seconds otherwise lost in lifting the pen between each letter.

It was an easy sell, not to mention, mandatory for all of us learn the new style of writing. Also, we were supposed to write only with fountain pens. Ink-pens. Aaah, those were the days, every body had fountain pens. Every student had little pieces of clothes in their pencil boxes, to absorb the extra ink that may spill from the pens. Some of use also used to carry those little ink bottles of black , and blue inks. There were ink blotches all across the classroom floor. Some even on walls. And definitely on our white uniform shirts. And what does one do, when one forgets to bring that piece of absorbent clothe ?

We used our ties ! You see, we had to wear blue ties as part of our uniforms. And that was our backup ink-absorbent.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. Hundreds of pages. Then proceeded to write the same way on every test paper. For a while, there was improvement. I could actually write faster, if not prettier. But my teacher used to ‘cut marks’ for handwriting. Pretty sure it was illegal, but who knew that ? So , in an effor to further improve my beutiful writing, I went over-board with the cursive writing stuff.

And destroyed it.

Now my writing was a gibberish mess. One could make out the words, surely, but it took more effort. After 1 hour of continous writing on school tests, my words would start to tilt and tumble. My F and T became the same. And my u, v and w were now identical triplets.  g and y used to swap places.

By 10th grade, I had degraded my beutiful writing to cursive gibberish. Until I was one day told they no longer need me to write on the school board.

Ouch.

And I have paid the price for my had handwriting ever since. Pretty sure I lost a lot of marks in college because they could no decipher my handwriting. Definitely sure some of my meeting notes were spat on in my team. But by that time, we had computers. So I could now just type out my e-mails, and it would turn out pretty and legible on the other end.

But life is not perfect. Every now and then, I have to write on a whilteboard, or chart-paper. And then my secret would be out.

So I curse my school. And my class teachers who wanted to ‘improve’ my writing.