Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Airtel and me, the media.

It was a pretty calm and unexciting day when the phone rang, as it always did, quite suddenly.

Voice: Hello. I'm calling from IMRB on behalf of Airtel broadband to check customer satisfaction. Could you spare five minutes of your time to answer some questions?

Me: Yes!

(Background: My broadband had been behaving like MTNL's dialup for three months. I would call regularly to complain, and they would respond that an engineer had come by and everything was wonderful. It was like Middle Eastern propaganda. I nearly forgot what a 4mbps connection looked like. Just the other day a guy at the call center blew up at me for being unprofessional when I called the connection "shit". His awesome response: "The shit connection, sir, is because we have server trouble." Server trouble is like the Indian online version of dog ate my homework. Big-ass faceless entity that's safe to shake a fist at. Like a picture of god.)

Voice: Is any member of your family in the media?

Me: Yes.

Voice: Who?

Me: Me.

(Silence.)

Voice: Thank you for your time. We're not looking for feedback from the media today.

And then she hung up to go find some non-media person. Today it's us media folk. Next come the bloggers. Then the ones on Twitter.

You know where this is headed.

Voice: Sorry sir, Airtel broadband's not looking for customer feedback from anyone using the internet.