The expat survival guide
The low cost of labor in India can be less a blessing than a curse when it comes to the incredibly spammy environment here. After several months of working from home, I’ve figured out some workarounds.
Cell phone spam
Daily text message spam, telemarketing calls on weekends — and that’s just from your wireless company.
Solution: Don’t bother asking to be put on their do-not-call list. That accomplishes nothing. Instead, blog about how Airtel sucks. They’ll take you off the spam list in a hurry.
You’ll still get telemarketing calls, but ignore anything with a 98920 prefix. They’re all from Airtel.
Crazed bill collectors
Your Internet billing period ends the 15th. You might get the invoice on the 31st, if you’re lucky. But a bill collector comes around starting the 16th. He comes twice a day for 30 days and rings your doorbell for 45 minutes straight, because he’s convinced your bai or spouse is home all day.
Solution: You could pay on the 15th, but you wouldn’t be a proper desi or a very good businessman. Hire an electrician to install a switch, or pry open your plastic doorbell and stuff some paper napkins between the striker and the plate. Ahh, the sweet sound of silence.
The 7 am doorbell
The kachrawali rings your doorbell every morning at an ungodly hour.
Solution: Leave a garbage bag outside before you go to bed.
The prepaid plan treadmill
Your prepaid cell phone plan runs out of credit every week. You have to pay for validity and call credit separately, and a third of the cost goes to random fees instead of call credit. Going subscription-based requires several proof of address docs such as a lease and a wired line and is a bit of a hassle.
Solution: Link your Citibank India account to your cell phone. Now you can recharge by simply sending a text message. It’s super-convenient every other week when it works.
Clean water
If you don’t have a water filter or don’t trust the one you’ve got, you’re going to be making daily corner shop runs for liter bottles.
Solution: Call up the shop and have them deliver a case or two.
I would’ve gotten this post done earlier, but in the last two hours I got five calls from someone named ‘Telemarketing.’ Silent mode is your friend.
on Thursday, February 1st, 2007, 6:31 pm in Bombay, Musings, Travel › 
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Very funny, Manish. India can be very frustrating when it comes to services. Some of these private companies are actually “efficient”. Just wait till you have to go to an RTO (Regional Transport Office) for a driving licence or something. Or, even worse, to a taluk office for a certificate of some sort.
I’ve found private companies here are super-efficient about collecting money and vanish when it come to delivering the service.
Talking about consumer services, how is it going with CAS? From what I recollect at the turn of the year it was a mess, with relatively few people properly connected.
What’s CAS?
Cable Access system. Big brouhaha about set-top boxes and how people should be able to get their cable and whatnot.
Solution: stick to youtube or dirty video sharing sites. Unless your bandwidth is limited from your DSL company.
Here is my 0.002 cents as far as “american” service is concerned
‘nuf said!
Solution to bill collection problem:
Switch to bills by email. They are on time every month, and you can pay them using Citibank e-banking as soon as you get the email. But don’t opt for direct debit, because the bills are frequently inaccurate.
very good and realistic blog entry Manish..
I heard similar stories from my brother in law who moved to india from US and started a company there and gave it up because of too many problems with indian system..telephones, internet,bribing this and that..He felt that just settling petty issues was taking too much time and so gave up dreams of owning his own company and settled as Director of US based company in India and says the company takes care of all those petty issues and he is able to concentrate on his career a lot more now..Now he likes living in India a lot..
sad state of affairs though..