Penned Thoughts

I really love to write, as should be evident by what I do in my free time. Now it so happens, every now and then, that I put some effort into writing something really lengthy and well thought out and then have to select the whole thing and hit Delete. This bugs me no end—I mean, I put some effort into that thing, why should no one ever get to read it, even if doing so won’t do anyone any good?

Today, I wrote an email to an Airtel customer support employee regarding an issue with my prepaid connection and realised, just before I was about to hit Send, that it had been a fruitless exercise. So I figured, you know, why not just publish it here before I send it to the crapper. Here goes nothing:

Hello, Rekha.

I’m Aayush Arya, subscriber of the Airtel #*8*1**3*9* from the Kolkata circle, and I tried to refill my balance with Rs. 555 through ICICI Bank’s Internet banking portal on Friday 27 March 2009. The transaction was successful and I received the payment confirmation #0097262815. However, the balance on my account remained stationery at whatever it had been before the transaction.

I called ICICI Bank’s customer care department and they assured me that my balance would get updated by the aforementioned amount within four days from the time of the transaction. Once the four days had passed and my balance still hadn’t been credited as it should have been, I called them again and they told me that the amount had been debited to my credit card already and that any slight that may have happened had to be on Airtel’s end and that I would be better served if I were to call the Airtel customer care department instead.

I did so and was told that I would be called back regarding the issue within two hours. Once several hours had passed, I called Airtel customer care again and was requested to wait for eight more hours. When I called again the next day, I was assured, in no uncertain terms, that my balance would be credited as requested within 48 hours. However, as I’d expected, that didn’t happen. I hope you can see how it’s justified for my patience to have waned by then. I called 121 again and requested that my call be escalated to the floor manager, who told me that this was something they couldn’t solve and that I would have to visit the nearest Airtel Connect office in my city, and that’s how I ended up sitting in front of you today.

I have attached a copy of my credit card statement as well as a screenshot of the dialog box that had appeared on my screen informing me about my payment confirmation number after I’d made the transaction with this email. Since this debacle, I’ve already refilled my balance with Rs. 100 and run out of that and I really don’t want to have to do it again, so I hope that you’ll assign my case the highest level of priority and get me a satisfactory solution as soon as possible.

Thank you!

It turned out, however, that the entire amount had already been refunded to my bank account on Tuesday 2 April 2009 and that I was raving mad about nothing. Poor me, right? Poor, innocent little me!