I bought a Nokia N82 on the 13th of April 2008 from Croma (Belapur). This march the mobile konked off. The battery drains very fast and it would get hot. So I took it to the Nokia Care center. It's the service arm of Nokia in India. There was some confusion so the manager (Rajesh) interfaced and explained to me that the warranty period was over as on 7January 2009! Luckily I had the bill from Croma and the ICICI charge slip which shows the purchase date as 13Apr2008. On showing these Rajesh said I would need to talk to the retailer and they might be able to get this sorted out. At Croma the bumbling idiot (Saha) was able to assure me that he would take care of it there was only one catch it would take a "little bit of time"..... in the meanwhile I would be phoneless. Also he wanted to me to get a piece of paper from Nokia saying the warranty was void on 7January2008. I went back to Nokia Care and the manager argued that they could not give me any such opeice other piece of paper after a phones warranty is voided. So I called up the head office at Bangalore and explained the case to them. They also agreed that Rajesh should provide this "reciept" saying warranty is void. They asked to talk to the Nokia Care center manager. I put them on the phone (yeah my meter is ticking while internal politics are played out)..... the store manager shot down the call center guys suggestion to give me the reciept citing some rule about no paper after warranty is over. Anyways the battery drained in the middle of the conversation (remember this is the defective phone I am carrying around all this time).... So then Rajesh in some benevolent moment of indiscretion offers to have my phone checked and if it is something that can be fixed he also offers to try and get it done under warranty. Turns out it was a couple of ICs which had been damaged by water (am suspecting spillage on the recent Kolkata trip).... this anyways voids the warranty so no point following up with anyone as it'll need to be fixed at cost! Well atleast it saved me a lot of time.

I'm not pissed about the fact that my phone was not fixed, though that is a concern, what really got my cat was the fact that I am talking about Nokia and Croma two of the most respected names in retail. The warranty did not cover the damage is not the issue what if it was something that the warranty could have covered. I am wondering how warranty expired in january 3 months before time. The explanation given by the Croma "bumbling idiot" was that the warranty expired because Croma buys the phones from Nokia and stores at some godown so warranty starts from when Croma buys and not when the end user, thats you and me, buys it from Croma. Thats cheating in my dictionary but then that's just me.

The second story is about my experience today. We had been planning to upgrade the microwave and buy a convection type which could be used for baking cakes, roasting stuff and all as the kid is growing up and these things might become in demand. So we did the scouting all of last week and zeroed in on a model from Electrolux. At Vijay Sales the price on Sunday was INR7490 in exchange for my existing microwave, otherwise it was 8990. So I was like cool lets do it on Friday as thats Gudi Padwa(the marathi new year) and maybe they'll have a better offer. Today it was 8990 and no exchange oh but there was a set of 5 treo microwave safe bowls with it (approx 1110 bucks worth).We looked at other options, which did have discounts today. Some were pretty good and we almost froze on a Godrej 30L convection. And then we came back to the Electrolux and we were like "Nyaaaaa! not the Godrej"..... so I filled out the form for the electrolux and paid the bill, in the meanwhile the sales person kept telling us that she was making sure the piece was ok and checking everything A little into the payment process(it took 10 minutes for the cashier to process us)... she says that the Treo set is out of stock and we'll need to pick it up on sunday. I know what sunday means so I took down the number where I can call before turning up to collect it. Anyways we reach home and unpack the microwave and guess what? No warranty card, no user manual, the starter kit is missing two bowls, the grill stand and the pizza pan(a non stick teflon coated pan another unique to this mwave) are missing!!! Yes sir the salesgirl was apparantly 'not" paying attention! It was my mistake that I did not act like a nosy, nit picking, nail biting buyer and did not check everything myself. It was my fault that I believed in the effeciency of a machinery that obviously does not work. More important, I was not paying attention, having been through the bad experience at Croma and having blacklisted them I should have checked. Anyways I'm going to go and see about the missing stuff tomorrow. Hopefully and I'm pretty sure it will be a matter of just telling the manager of the sales person and then getting hte missing pieces.