Who’s responsible?

We are trying to be professional, we are! I love the way the service industry in this city, or for that matter any city I have lived in, functions. Whether it’s your dry cleaning, which offers pick up and drop services, the deadpan-face commitment from, say a plumber, to come back the next morning because he “understands your emergency” only for you to wake you to discover that his phone has been switched off, to the indispensable lady who helps to keep your house functioning — ‘clockwork’ is a word that is fast losing its relevance.

From, “Don’t worry Madam I will do it by tomorrow,” to a very svelte voice on the other end promising to fix your problem in “less than 48 hours” — I think I have reached a stage where I have started to regret not learning how to fix the plumbing of a house, dry cleaning, fixing network problems of my mobile and so on.

The classiest act was by my favourite mobile network provider. My house is like some sort of a high-security building. Mobile networks find it rather hard to work. Call the provider and tell him to check what could be the problem or attach a booster to the apartment and he’ll say, “We can fix this in three to four months”.

Erm, is he actually expecting me to stick around for that long? Lovers move on much faster than that after a breakup. So God forbid, if I do have to take a call when I am at home, you’ll finding me hanging halfway out of my verandah and screaming on top of my lungs, “ Can you hear me? I can hear you!”
Ah, life.

I remember this one incident where a friend’s husband was waiting out on the streets at 5am with his luggage because his taxi never turned up. But even better was this other person whose cabbie ‘forgot’ and even confessed to it. The cost of that memory loss was nearly Rs10,000 as this guy had to buy another ticket to take the flight out of Bangalore.

Why is there no accountability in this society? No one is offering these services for charity and I think efficiency is the least one can expect. The catch was explained to me some time back.

If your life is built on one big moneybag, chances are that everything happens in a jiffy around you. Your expensive driver will come on time, your multiple domestic assistants will be prompt and even speak the language you want them to and will have a handy concierge service to take care of your basic problems and requirements; the lower you slip down the scale of affluence, your advantages diminish. So, therefore, a regular hardworking middle class person will have to work twice as hard to make his life a half as easy. The explanation was quite simple even if it was unacceptable.

Whether you pay Rs100 at the local vegetable shop or Rs500 at a gourmet organic store to buy your vegetables, isn’t it your right to have access to fresh and edible greens? I don’t get it.