I should have known any cellular service represented by Kareena Kapoor and Sharukh Khan is nothing but bollocks.
And that, my friends is what AirTel is.
A friend of mine once told me that he used Orange because he liked the graphics and the ads..apparently it was against his principles to use a network like AirTel because of its unbearable graphics, no matter how good a starting deal he got.
i laughed it off as ridiculous but now coming to think of it, if a service takes that much trouble over its look, then surely it will take that much time over its service...AirTel seems oblivious to this concept.
Infact one can compare AirTel to those types of people with lots of money and no class.
It has clearly emptied its pockets over Kareena and Sharukh but lacks the essential quality of a good campaign. Its graphics could have been done by some flunky engineer student, let alone flunky graphic designer.
But judging-a-book-by-its-cover aside, lets look at its service. I don’t know about anywhere else but the network in bombay sucks bigtime. I am a misfortunate user of the greatly publicised ’Magic’ card....typing the very word sends me into disbelieving convulsions.
The first time I tried to recharge my card, after all the secret little scratching of the card with the edge of a 1 rupee coin( probably my only finances left after using AirTel which has apparently wiped out my pockets to contribute to the excessive paychecks of a certain miss kapoor) and all the punching in of the ’faawteen dijit cowd’ ( as instructed by the irritatingly wannabe posh voice recording) my card not only refused to recharge but banned me from all further attempts. Customer care was even more clueless than I was...or was that careless because they seemed to show the concern of a bloodsucking flea for an already drained stray dog. Which pretty much left me to trudging off in the hot mumbai sun to the ’nearest Airtel office’( not-so-near may I add).
Now I hate moving my backside, why do you think I have a cell phone for pete’s sake, but to move my backside just to be greeted by some hapless member of the airel staff is a trifle annoying. Anyway to cut a long story short, I finally recharged my card. with way too much effort. I also should mention that on occasion when i’ve walked into a couple of airtel offices to buy new recharge cards, I have had to encounter one beige-clad-red-lipsticked surly chick too many. perhaps it was because I was buying the cheapest card possible but hey, atleast smile at me for having the tenacity to still use your crummy service, woman!
I could go on forever, about how the raised rates of sms
(after the initial tempting offer of 3 months of free sms which by the way, was another huge hoax because every excited free-sms-user promptly clogged the whole network and so none of your sms’s got sent anyway..)have caused me to consider frying pakodas on the road to buy new phone cards every 2 days, about how once the network was so crappy I couldn’t even get through to the ’magic menu’ to recharge my account, let alone anyone else, and how customer care once again when contacted by phone, refused to move their smug rear ends. My list of complaints is endless.
So please, this being my first good deed for the community, please let me save you from the evil grip of the over-hyped Airtel.
And if you’re still not convinced, switch on your tv and watch one of those horrorshow ads....it’s enough to scare you back into using that good old landline.
Heed my warning, people, you will not regret it....!!