Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Routines

Sometimes having a routine is really important & helpful. I have always found routines really boring and so didn't ever try to follow one. But I realize that subconsciously I have been following many routines nevertheless.

Like in avoiding to have a routine of waking up early & reaching office by a particular hour. I have made a routine of waking up late and anyway I reach office at a particular hour (late). No matter what, I tend to wake up between 8:30 & 9:00 and reach office by 11 - 11:30. I will wake up and look for my newspaper and spend half an hour with it, which has to be accompanied/followed by a cup of tea. Office is also kind of routine - reach office, check mails, check blog updates, start work, have lunch, work again (lazily), have tea, work again, have some snacks, work again, leave office. This hardly ever changes. Reach home, have dinner, watch TV/Movie, go to sleep. Even in a longer time frame, Whenever I get a long holiday or take a long leave, I go to my home town. Whenever I get bored at home I call up my friends & family and talk to them.

So, no matter How bad I think about the routines.. I keep following them all the time. Then I realize it's not all that bad. Because It kind of avoids the question "What to do next??" and saves a lot of time by that because that question is really difficult to answer at times.

But then I find that a scary thought as well. What if I never think of that question again & keep doing the same things forever? That is the kind of life I get nightmares about. As, I am a die hard believer of the motto "Change is Good".

So, I plan to strike a balance by consciously following healthy routines & then consciously breaking them on routine intervals ;) Well that sounded funny, didn't it. It's actually kind of tricky, as in I wish to use a routine to break out of routines. But then that could really work out. For example, I am going to set a daily routine, which includes time to wake up, daily office hours & few hours of sports. Then as another routine I plan to try out new things, like changing the sports/physical activity after some time. Obviously it will also give me the time to ask myself the question "What to do next?".

Now let's see how it turns out.. How well I could carry this will only become clear in a couple of months from now, but at least I feel good to follow a routine for a change ;)

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Moved to Airtel

I have been using Airtel mobile for last 4 years & have been more or less satisfied with their service. They have been a bit of pain in the butt at times but, If I look back, I have got a good service and more important good value for money all the time.

But this post is not about Airtel mobile service, it's about my painful adventures with Tata Indicom Broadband. I first got a Tata Indicom Broadband connection about 3 years ago. Then they had just started the service & Tata's brand name attracted me to them. I used their service for about 6 months (really??) and for most of this I was troubled with service disconnection, down servers, faulty recharge & worst of all extremely poor customer service. To get hold of one of their CC executive, I had to wait at least 10 mins & the issues got resolved when they really felt like doing it. So, naturally I got sick of their service and discontinued my alliance with them. Unfortunately at the point, not many service providers were there to avail the service so that might be one of the reasons for their poor show.

But that was past and they were new... so 2 years later I decided to give Tata's another chance. I took a new broadband connection from them and it got connected without much hassle in 4 days (not bad). This time I used the service for 9 months (not bad at all). During this time I faced disconnections/server down but less frequently, as in say twice a month or so. Speed was good but weird thing was, if I am doing a download using a download manager, my browsing speed virtually went to nil and it took a couple of minutes to open a gmail page. Another strange problem, when my account expired, I couldn't log into their online portal to recharge my account from any other Internet connected PC as well. So, it was time for customer service again. I filed a complaint for both and placed order for a recharge voucher. For the browsing speed issue they said they were clueless & will look into it.. Nothing happened. For the recharge issue, it has been about a month and I still can't recharge my account from any other PC. I was sent the recharge voucher, after repeated calls to them for 6 days, about 15 days after placing the order. Thankfully I was out of station at that time and I politely asked them to send the voucher back and not to bother me again, as I was again sick of their services again. I would like to add that there were the two major setbacks.. their service, customer service & technical assistance has been poor through out. I had to make at least one call to them every month. More than two years in service, have they learnt anything yet?

After I came back last Sunday, I heard that Airtel has started offering broadband connections in my area and that their customer service is pretty good along with many plans combined with their Land line connection absolutely free that also with zero monthly rental. Well tired of customer service that I was, this sounded really tempting and yesterday I signed up for Airtel Broadband service. To my utmost surprise they completed the cabling work yesterday itself and I was really impressed with the speed & the way it was done. I didn't have to see another dangling wire out of my window or a new hole in the window frame. It was done really smoothly & professionally. I hardly noticed the new wire-case used to cover the running cable. By today afternoon my broadband connection was functional & my land line connection was active. To top it all I am getting better download speed (old avg speed + 6kbps) as well. My browsing doesn't die when I am downloading in parallel. So, by far I am very impressed, but now the real show will begin.

Going by the start I expect a smooth ride with Airtel and will surely recommend it to anyone. But it may be too early do so. Let's see how it turns out :)

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