Sunday, June 03, 2007

The Day A Mobile Conked Off...

A sleepy, normal Sunday in June 07, in the bustling metropolis of Pune, India. A DISK (double income single kid) family has just wrapped up lunch, and is preparing for the afternoon siesta - you guessed right, the family is Goan, and the lunch did consist of fish curry rice, followed by mangoes.

12.35 pm: He picks up his cell, notices that it is dead. Damn! What if someone was calling him? He quickly sets up the charger, and plugs in the phone. And tries booting the cell - the cell flickers on, but hey, something's wrong! There is no welcome message, the cell switches off instead!

12.36 pm: He is beginning to panic. Flickes the switch on a couple of times, rams the charger pin in so hard, the phone squeals in pain (OK, that was an exaggeration), and tries again. No luck!

12.38 pm: A dozen more tries later, this time having tried playing with the battery, and the SIM, and his daughter's barbie doll, he accepts that his cell is dead!

12.53 pm: 15 agonizing meetings have passed by. He is starting to get more and more jittery. What about all those tele marketing calls he must have missed? What about all those "download kijiye aur jitiye" SMSes that would be vying for his attention? And what about all those friends who would be dead worried by now? Remember, at an average of one SMS every 5.5 mins, he should have sent atleast 3 by now!

12.54 pm: He begs his wife to lend her phone for 5 mins. She refuses.

12.58 pm: He begs again, this time she relents. After all, 5 mins is less than her mean time between SMSes.

12.59 pm: He makes a note of important cell phone numbers, and then tries messaging his friends. It's a hopeless situation - he cannot make sense of the Samsung UI! After all, he has been a Nokier all his life!

1.03 pm: Close to a state of desperation and depression, he hands back the Samsung. Life seems very bleak now.

1.07 pm: He has a brainwave. He goes online, and sends out a spurt of SMSes through mail! Thank god - atleast his friends won't fret to death now!

1.25 pm: He has had enough. He dresses up, takes out his car, and goes mobile hunting.

1.35 pm: He has checked every possible shop in town - but remember, it's a lazy Sunday and everyone has downed shutters! He cannot believe it - shouldn't cell phone replacement be part of every town's disaster management plan???

1.46 pm: Dejected, and demoralised, he is back home. Clueless. Scared. Worried. Sad

1.56 pm: Another brainwave! SOS!!! Out goes a flurry of SMSes in the world wide web, calling all samaritans for help! Can you lend me a spare cell phone?

2.03 pm: The first offer of help! His friend lives just around the corner, and offers to lend him her spare phone.

2.07 pm: He has the spare phone in his hand. He switches batteries, and lo and behold, his cell switches on!

2.08 pm: The first SMS goes out... life is back to normal.

4 comments:

Harsha Kumar said...

LOL..
I'm still trying to figure out how your daughter's barbie doll fit into all of this!!

Arati Rahalkar said...

Man - this is very amusing :)

btw - the rate at which you write blogs, I think you should write one more on these lines "The Sunday when blogspot was down" :)

sandeepjoshi said...

Heheeee. Pretty amusing.

Well, you detailed a lot about the Nokiar but what about the Nokia itself? After all, that was the root of frustation and loss of all-important nap on Sunday.

I recently faced this horror too. My phone, for no reason, stopped abruptly. After my relentless efforts and arguments with executives, I got it replaced. Same story happened with my brother.

A die-hard nokiar is about to try something else now.

Nokia is producing pathetic phones these days.

Siddhesh said...

You are absolutely right, Nokia is producing absolutely ridiculously defective phones these days. We purchased a new model with multi-media and all that a few months, and it used to just stop responding and freeze. We took it to Nokia twice, and each time it came back with the same problem. Finally, the Nokia engineer suggested we use it without the multimedia card!

I sold the 12500 rupees phone for something like 5000 in the second hand market.

But my story is different. The phone I had a problem with is a real old one, almost 4 years in December. I have used and misused and abused it, gotten it wet, gotten it flung around the room, and sent over a 100,000 messages and received an equal amount. You really cannot blame it for giving up sometime!