ExpertDabbler

This is inspired by Vatsan’s cell phone kaviyam here.

I clearly remember the day i got my first cellphone from Reliance Office in Haddows Road. That was the day when our Mumbai Maestro went hammer and tongs against the Pakistanis in the 2003 world cup. That was Sachin’s last big match winning effort.

RIM was a rage then. The crowd at Reliance offices those days would far outnumber the crowd in front of Sathyam Cinemas. Reliance offered mobiles at throwaway prices and forever changed the mobile landscape in the country.

My good friend Kirti, a CA with Reliance, came up with forms et al to my residence and got me the phone in his employee quota. 12 cheques for 36 months and some other nonsense stuffs is what i vaguely remember now.

The first 2 months of my cell phone usage was absolutely free for calls to RIM to RIM during pre-launch period.

Reliance then made an All India launch. Soon horrible customer service, bills for unmade calls, poor connectivity, every Kandaswamy Munuswamy using it, and the need to stick to the same service provider all added to Reliance lose its market share and credibility in a hurry.

Reliance strategy was so quick and flexible that each Reliance Web World would have a different idea of how a particular tariff scheme would work. Talk about keeping everyone guessing.

Roaming in a reliance phone is a process which would put that of a missile lauch to shame. I am not good enough to explain such a complicated process in plain english.
So lets take this with a case study.

Suppose i am travelling to coimbatore.
The signal would go off as soon as the train crosses Avadi.
The next day morning, on reaching coimbatore i need to dial a specific number with some *** s prefixed. (Not very different from ‘Thirandhidu Seesame’). Then after a lightning quick half an hour, i would get an SMS stating that my number in Coimbatore is xxxxxx which is different from my Reliance number in chennai.

Then whatever calls i make would be like me calling from a phone in Coimbatore. Suppose,i am going to tiruppur, i need to do the whole damn process again. Other cell phone operators cried foul over reliance’s backroom tactics for roaming facility. But then Reliance always preferred late cuts to straight drives.

I remember getting ISD calls with local numbers (ironically it was always touchtel numbers;))

A visit to the Reliance cutomer care office is one good source of entertainment. You can see the hapless cutomer and the customer care representative doing a la Prabu and Karthik act of Agni Nakshathiram (Not much physical i could see though. It was all verbal. Tch..Tch)

One of my colleague got around three bills from Reliance for Rs 5000 each.
‘So what?’ you might ask. Nothing wrong except that he was using BSNL prepaid.

Reliance’s billing was if anything, legendary. I have heard cases where customers have been charged for calls the duration of which was 0.1 seconds.
Now, it should take extra-ordinary skills to make a call and communicate in all of 0.1 seconds don’t you think? But thats how it was and yes you were billed.

One of my friend Anand was in Reliance customer care and billing in the Kerala circle. Pity that i miss that guy now. For those anecdotes would keep my blog content hilarious for months to come. Anand was spotted somewhere in Africa when reports last came in.

On the other hand there were customers who used Reliance Phones as mobile public booths, made money overnight and vanished. Reliance had the talent and bandwidth to attract such customers in thousands.

On the positive side, RIM phones were kinda water proof. Once I had the phone in my shirt pocket and entered the waters in TADA falls. The treatment is similiar to wet clothes. Spread it out in the sun, charge the batteries(not needed for clothes) and bingo things were normal.

There were fewer SMS spam in RIM phones those days. And i had fewer calls to take while peeing from tele-marketing execs offering free credit cards, personal loans, home loans, insurance policies blah blah. To my knowledge they offered everything except condoms. I just dont know how these people manage to get my cell number(No, they are not my blog readers anyway). The standard answer was always “Got it from our database Sir”

Which database madam? Oracle or Sybase?

I ditched RIM when my amma gave a deadline to change it. She could never reach me at Navalur when she had to. That ended one hot passionate affair with RIM.

I converted my RIM to prepaid and offered it free to my cousin who is doing his MCA here in chennai. He stopped visiting me ever since.

So my once beloved RIM still stays in my place even though we parted ways long back.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about stickiness factor in Tipping Point. RIM is the stickiest mobile one would ever come across.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.