I had posted about Scott Kelby's recent customer service experience. There is one part of the blog that I find very important.

Business is too hard to come by right now. Every customer matters. Just treat us like we do, and we’ll send you money. It’s as easy as that.

In light of my recent experiences with smartshoppers.in and MapMyIndia, I'd say that both these companies seem to have taken their positions for granted and don't think twice about not behaving well with their customers. By not behaving well I don't mean that they misbehave. I just think that they take their customers for granted. MapMyIndia is a truly horrible experience (I'm sure others may have had better experiences) primarily because they don't provide the simplest of information.

If you look at the photograph, you'd notice that it went out for delivery on the 10th of November (On PAFEX vehicle for delivery) and, again on the 11th of November. At this stage, neither MapMyIndia and nor Pafex were able to explain where the consignment was. Between these two agencies I ended up making 10 calls, 8 times out of which I was either put on hold or, disconnected without an explanation. Finally, the lady at the Pafex line hooked me up with the dispatcher who connected me with the person with the consignment and we figured out how long it would take to get delivered. In fact I am happy that Pafex went to all that trouble. And actually delivered on the time they committed. Unfortunately they haven't reverted on the mysterious previous out for delivery. And, their customercare email thereafter went into a limbo.

Here's what the MapMyIndia twitter handle had to say. And then read this comment. In my book this is one step short of being insouciant. At no time have they yet responded to the questions raised to their support address and, thereafter conclude that the mere delivery of the device (hell no one has actually called up to ask how I plan to get the device registered) as meeting their quality of service.

Shoddiness it isn't. It is just misguided arrogance and thinking that the customer has no where to go. By the way, don't use smartshoppers.in as well. They simply aren't geared to handle customer complaints by phone or email.

The trend about having to moan and piss venom on twitter to get things going is also counter-productive. Which is why I fail to understand the rationale for companies not having some sort of a RequestTracker system. If they don't want to host it themselves they could look at SaaS options isn't it ? And, get folks to respond to the issues ?

If there was a single feature I could wish for the Kindle, it would be the ability to create folders inside the /documents and have them reflect as the way I categorize books. In a physical world I've always been able to keep a layout of where my books are in my memory. In the world of the Kindle (especially one that is keeling over with around a 1000 books) it is becoming puzzling to even figure out whether I have the book to begin with.

Besides this obvious annoyance I think the Kindle has been an extraordinarily smart purchase this season. The ability to stop buying actual physical books and yet not miss them (even though lots and lots of folks do claim that ebook readers aren't a replacement) while not taking a hit on the book gorging spree is a heaven-sent.

The other day at Landmark I noticed that a couple of books on cooking had been hurriedly shoved inside the Travel Writing section. It was a little funny moment. Perhaps someone had picked them up and thereafter figured it would be nice to come back to them later. Or, perhaps it was the obvious flaw in categorization that bookstores are becoming so well known for. Anyway it reminded me about this bad habit we used to have. When we had exhausted the limits of borrowing on our own library cards but we needed "that one book", the accepted trick was to put the book under a different category and shelf and ensure that a friend is at hand to identify, pick and withdraw the book on your behalf.

Come to think of it, there are enough instances when we do the same in life. With our goals, aspirations and ambitions. We tend to put them on a different shelf and imagine that we'd have the time to revisit and rework on them. And, we then end up lamenting that there isn't any time to do all of that. It may not be possible to really seize the day but then putting them aside is similar to forgetting. The only difference being that it is just forgotten and not erased. And, that which is not erased comes back multiplied many times to haunt the hell out of our solitary time.

A conversation with Poonam revealed the much needed information about health and memory.

So, she says, Happiness is nothing but good health and a bad memory. And, adds to my question First one certainly is, and if you are unlucky - second one will add to it. ;)

More questions around the remaining possible combinations reveal another insight - The first one is actually good - sometimes may need some work. But the second one means physical pain and mental peace. ;)

It is always interesting that once I start reading or learning about something I tend to see various instantiations of the topic across the spectrum of reading I do. I guess that is how it works for everyone but I've forever been amazed by it.

My latest hobby-horse is to subscribe to various Wiki{m|p}edia related mailing lists and learn about it. A frank confession would be in place here. Although I've always used Wikipedia to check up or, learn about stuff; possess a Wikireader which I use very frequently; have been terribly pleased when a few of my CC-licensed pictures have been used as adjoining content in Wikipedia articles, I am totally clueless about the groups of folks who contribute to, edit or in general are Wikipedia Ambassadors. The lists and especially the India centric list is a fascinating way to learn about how things are.

A set of discussions around encouraging more content in native languages, checking up the rendering properties of various mobile browsers etc got me thinking about what stops me from contributing to the Wikipedia. And the answer is simple - I don't know where to begin. Contributing to localization for FOSS projects seems like a much easier task. In short, the following things seem very puzzling to me:

• what kind of content can I contribute ? I could perhaps begin with translations of existing English pages but I'm certain that doesn't fit into the scheme of usage that Wikipedia perceives the regional language versions to have
• how do I begin to write ? Wikipedia seems to have a different tone and tenor for content and, understanding the innards of citations and references would take some time
• how can I get some hand-holding and "let us do this together" kind of sessions that can help me going ? I guess I am looking for some jamming sessions with the old hands to understand what can be a good contributions
• and, finally, can I just concentrate on photographing and suggest appropriate photographs to be added to Wikipedia articles ?

I hope that once Wikipedia does set up the office infrastructure in India it would be focusing on extending the momentum already in place and, undertaking such Wikicamp (?) like activities across few cities. That would be a good place to begin learning about the Wikipedia stuff.

There ought to be a way to put in a settings options to disallow folks from adding you to all sorts of Groups on Facebook. In real life we do get the means to exercise our choice on whether or not to join a group. Taking that away is not making things easy. It is making things tremendously dumb. Add to that the fact that removing oneself as an Admin is equally impossible. 

I don't know how others use Facebook but for me it isn't an "everybody is a friend, everybody is nice" network. In fact, I am on a daily pruning of my network on Twitter and Facebook just to ensure that the signal/noise ratio is balanced in my favor. And, I don't have to end up using Favorites on Twitter as a means to bookmark interesting stuff for later reading.

The other bit about sending a FB request because of a follow/mutual_follow on Twitter is best left for another day.

For the past 6 years I've been using Thunderbird for my corporate mail account. And, I've stuck with Thunderbird through thick and thin even though I've occasionally tried out Evolution, KMail and Sylpheed. I think I have to start to think about giving Thunderbird the good old "so long..."

The mailstore has ballooned into a 28GB mess and growing. And this is with regular deletion of mailing list mails and what not. The recent Thunderbird just stutters and splutters when asked to do anything besides downloading, filtering and displaying-when-clicked. I don't even dare and let it search thoroughly. The last time I asked it to index the store it churned for a mind curdling 15 hours before crashing the application harder than I'd crash while roller-skating.

The problem is that I am staring at now is not what to migrate to. I'm more or less convinced that offlineimap along with a decent MUA would do the job pretty nicely. The problem that I think I need to figure out a graceful way to solve is what to do with this monster of a mailstore. I need this migrated in the exact specific layout of folders and along with that I need to export the filters. The one obvious solution of pushing them up to an IMAP store and then downloading isn't graceful (I am not blessed with that size of data store).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

For more than one reason I cannot wait for 2010 to get over. While it hasn't been the best of any year, the fearful feeling you get when you hear about folks passing away, especially when you've just met them is far too much to carry along.