Counterproductive Technology

Not very long ago, I was at Kanjur Marg station in the queue to buy a local train ticket. I was not in a hurry but, I was feeling a little impatient standing in the same line with lot of people who are in a great hurry. And some 15 minutes later, it was my turn and as most people must have experienced, there is a 50 year old clerk (who is never in a hurry!), reacting as if he has seen the keyboard for the first time in his life and he has been reacting the same way since 1992!

It is the closest you can get to study how cavemen would have reacted had they found a yellow (formerly white) keyboard in a deserted cave. He types carefully searching for each alphabet on the keyboard and then presses the print command and then the loud dot matrix printer takes over. Sometime between the clerk pressing the print button and the printer printing my ticket, I decided to make a compilation of instances where installing/upgrading technology has made the process slower and inefficient. So here is the list.

1. Railway tickets: According to my rough estimate, manually giving out tickets in a local station clears the queue about two and a half times faster than the "computerized" ticket vending. In fact, many local stations open their manual ticket counter during rush hours. But I am sure that the computerized ticket vending helps in accounting and other back office processes.

2. The automatic semi-touch free dustbin I have seen in France: This is absolute oxymoron. First of all, how can anything be semi-touch? You either touch it or you don’t! Second of all who wants to semi-touch a dustbin? It has an automatic lid that opens automatically when you keep your hand over it. Good enough, but the moron part of it is that the lid does not close automatically! We have to stoop to press the “close” button on the dustbin once we are done. I wanted to see if there was some sort of a timeout mechanism after which the lid automatically closes, I waited for 2 minutes but it did not close.

3. Ultra slim TVs: What difference does it make whether the TV is one inch thick or one fourth of an inch thick when the TV hangs on a wall and we sit least five or six feet away from it?


4. Wireless keyboard and mouse for a desktop: The writing is pretty much on the wall that it is a waste. Not only do they run out of battery once in two weeks to piss the user off, there is a good chance that they will be misplaced or lost. I think the cluttering wires are easier to manage.

5. Texting with a touch phone: Texting just got crappier with the advent of iphones and other alleged “iPhone killers”


Things that need special mention
1. Widows Vista: old favorite
2. Any iPhone apps that give GPS directions: not a big thing in India yet
3. Google wave: email reinvented so that you cannot check it in a cyber café near you.
4. Laptop steering wheel desk: You can now tweet your way to hell.



This list is in no way comprehensive, please add stuff if you can think of something.

The Implications of the Pigeon-Fool Principle

For those who have not read the pigeon-fool principle, please click here before reading further.

The pigeon-fool principle though intended to look funny on the outside, is much more than a mere extrapolation of a funny incident. It is, like a lot of funny things, reality at a higher level. The results of the poll are compiled and as of now, there were over 100 hundred people who read the blog entry but only 36 have decided to vote with almost 90% (31/36) of them preferring pigeon poop over the fool’s mucus on their shirts. The result though hardly surprising made me ask myself, Why the difference?

If you look at the situation objectively, both pigeon poop and fool's mucus have very similar outcomes when they fall on our shirt. Both are equally unfortunate and equally disgusting things to happen to anyone, they take the same amount of effort to wipe and wash the stain etc. But still people are biased towards one of the options! This proves my notion that, given a choice between two equally bad options, people choose the familiar one.

The beauty of the whole argument lies in the parallel we can draw with the elections in India. In most of the constituencies, people are forced to choose between pigeon poop (congress) and fool’s mucus (BJP and allies) and people choose the familiar pigeon poop. And not surprisingly, a lot of people choose not to vote at all (Voter turnout was 43% in Mumbai and 35% for my poll, which is good enough considering that TATA Tea did not sponsor a “Jaago Re” campaign for my blog). Hence even after 5 years of dismal governance, the congress party is back to power in Maharashtra.

Unless we figure out a way where deserving people can rise up to the leadership level, India will always remain a flawed democracy that is more of a “Deeply-Hippocratic-Cheaply-Oligarchic-Republic” as opposed to the “Sovereign-Socialist-Secular-Democratic-Republic” we are supposed to be going by my 7th class civics text book.

P.S: the content of this blog turned out to be much more serious than intended by the author (me) but what the hell!



P.P.S: The artist (me again) intended the bird to look like a pigeon and the guy like he has a cold and he is not sure how successful he is.

SERVICE UNAVAILABLE!

I am going to Hyderabad for Diwali later this month and I was all set to buy the tickets. Everything fell in place so well. One of my cousins is getting married just a few days before Diwali, so I can directly attend the wedding and later head to Rajahmundry to celebrate the festival. I love attending weddings (though I cannot recall a single wedding that I attended and didn’t fall asleep in one of those plastic chairs while the rituals are meticulously being followed) and I love Rajahmundry, so it is double whammy this Diwali and my spirits are pretty high.
It was just another Wednesday afternoon after lunch, I just tapped my spider and gave it a hi-five (hi-eight may be) and sat down at the comp to book the tickets, RAC 12, not bad at all, I thought and clicked through a series of links filling up all kinds of forms to book an online ticket home. Everything was going on well, I Okayed the transaction through online SBI and the payment was made and I got the intermediate screen saying that my ticket is being generated and the site will be automatically redirected in 5 seconds. And that was when lady luck decided to ditch me; I was redirected in 5 seconds, not to my ticket but to a black and white screen showing my fate in bold capital letters SERVICE UNAVAILABLE. (My usual luck!) One of those error messages I can never make sense of. What exactly do they mean by SERVICE UNAVAILABLE? Which "service" was unavailable? Is it the ticket-printing service? Is it the ticket-booking service? Or is it the whole of IRCTC? The only service that worked was taking-money-from-your-bank service and may I add it was very prompt. They took 300-something rupees from my bank account and I don’t know what happened to them. I tried to access the failed transactions page in IRCTC and I get the same message SERVICE UNAVAILABLE. Ironically, five minutes later, SBI sends me an SMS thanking me for using online SBI for “successfully” booking my railway ticket! This is what happens when you depend on three Govt. services- Indian Railways, online SBI and last but not the least IITB’s LAN for doing one simple thing!
My money still hangs in balance somewhere, so does my holiday. Spirits still high, bank balance slightly lower :(.

PS: I am still waiting for the day when I can completely trust the internet to do simple things involving money.