Take lessons … Your hassle lessens …

Still I am struggling with the sales people. These guys are born to lie. My car has arrived on Friday. Still the loan amount has not gone to the dealer and that is preventing me from taking the delivery. I applied exactly a week before and was promised that the money will go to the dealer last Friday itself. Still the money has not gone and I am getting a ton of reasons portraying their creative talent.

Friday: Money has to come from Bombay and we are waiting … (As if money is arriving by flight)

Saturday: Money has not come back from the previous Maruti dealer (Couldn’t they check it before itself?)

Sunday: It’s Sunday (What a great Trivia!!)

Monday: It will reach in another 10 minutes (It was the status throughout the day)

Today: No-one is picking up their mobile (Who, the hell, invented the Caller ID?)

Even after learning this valuable lesson of how frustrating the customer experience is with improper replies, I repeated the same mistake when I was on the other side. Friday was our Alpha release and our clients were waiting for our release.

We were still getting some bugs in the regression testing and there was a conference call every hour to sync-up on the status. I was doing the same mistake – “We are running the regression test suite and it should be ready in an hour”. Now I understand how frustrating it would have been for the clients to hear the same status in every call. Luckily we were able to fix the bugs and push the code to alpha but the mismanagement remains as a scar in my mind. I think I was a bit tense and nervous that I was not ready to declare that we have bugs.

Who knows, the sales person could be in the same shoes with some obstacles in the loan processing, or , he could have his TV remote in one hand and his mobile in another replying that “ I am still waiting in the bank, Sir”