Sunday, August 29, 2010

Here Cometh the BSNL repair man


Telephone, originally uploaded by oskay.

This past Friday a short Tamil guy showed up at my door, clutching a large phone that looked like a relic of the 1970's. A bit puzzled why he was here, he showed me a crumpled piece of paper indicating that he was from BSNL (the local telephone co) and was to do a repair here. True, I did have a problem with erratic internet connectivity, but how was he and his old phone with a long jerryrigged cable with wires sticking out of one end going to do anything about this? Sitting down on the floor next to my modem and telephone wire, he looked perplexed for a couple of minutes and then smiled, pointing at a telephone cable, indicating that it was the problem. Quite certain that the problem was not fixed and definitely not confident in his testing methods, I stalled by asking him to look at the non-working telephone connection in my bedroom. As he took his only other tool - a tiny screwdriver - and began the lengthy process of unscrewing to get into the phone jack, I called the apartments manager at school. When a worker from school arrived, the BSNL support number was called. When they asked me to go to the Start menu, I promptly told them I had a Macintosh. "Do you have XP or Windows 7?" they asked. Seeing the futility of the conversation, I told them I had neither but if they told me what they were looking for, I'd find it myself. Needless to say, the school worker offered to take my computer and modem to the local office. A few hours he returned, shaking his head after dealing with the unorganized, incompetent government business. It seems like my problem is still here. I regret not taking a photo of the man with his phone, but I was focusing hard on not chuckling at the scene presented before me. I shouldn't be surprised anymore by such things. Oh well....

1 comment:

Pat said...

Oh, that is funny. And I haven't seen one of these phones in a long time.