Thank You, Mr. Yadav

I had decided that I would post a blog every Sunday, but I missed last week, for a very simple reason – the phone was dead!

Typically what happens when it rains, the phone went dead last Sunday. I asked my father and wife to register the complaint, and as usually happens, realised on Wednesday that the complaint was still not registered.

So, like all net-savvy netizens, I decided to register my complaint online. And realized that while my internet connection works beautifully, the same cannot be said of the MTNL website.

The fault complaint booking page asks you to register your telephone number and your CA number to proceed to register your complaint. But the funny thing is that it does not accept more than 8 digits! So you can’t move ahead and register.

So I did the next best thing. I clicked on ‘Contact Us’ and sent an e-mail stating both – my complaint as well as the problem on the complaint page.

Promptly, I received a response. It said –

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

navimumbai.helpdesk@mtnl.net.in

So there we were - back to square one. And three days had passed.

I again requested my father and my wife - separately this time - to go to MTNL and register a complaint, hoping that one of them might do it; which my wife did - on Friday.

And she was told that there are a lot of complaints so it might take 4-5 days to attend.

I braced myself - considering that yesterday was the 4th Saturday.

And then came the surprise!

This morning (Sunday) at about noon, Mr. Yadav from MTNL rang our doorbell. He had come to repair the line. Upon asking, he mentioned that due to the number of complaints, he and his colleagues decided to attend to some complaints that they thought would possibly be small issues on the weekend so that they can sort the big problems quickly between Monday and Tuesday. Within 10 minutes, he had identified the problem (loose connection due to heavy winds last week) and corrected it.

His fees - Nothing. No chai-paani (bribe) or anything of that sort.

Thank You, Mr. Yadav!

Now if only they set about improving their website’s complaint page...