Online Shopping - Part 2

Dedicated to my youngest reader, who lives around the corner - Anjali Mallena. Thank you, Anjali.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface:  We are all ageing by the day in modern world, so to help those who have become victims of partial or complete amnesia or other related maladies in the intervening two months, here is how the earlier serving on Online Shopping ended: "To be fair, we (meaning, the author's family) do order a few things online nowadays and not many have gone wrong.  (To be continued in Part Two)".......Now, with that bit of restoration having been done, we can move along.

A few months ago, about that time in the morning when this scribe usually enjoys his best sleep, he was shaken up with a fair degree of violence (granted, that was unusual) by his dear wife.  When he woke up all bleary-eyed and flustered, he saw the lady standing by the bed-side, arms akimbo and eyes flashing - a typical posture assumed to signal that all was not well, especially for the individual trying to stir up.  Empirical knowledge oozing from accumulated wisdom and very swift analysis of the stored data relating thereto made the author recognize pronto, the unfriendly environment for what it was, even though he was still coming abreast of the fuller details of early morning existence.   Without a cheery`howdy' or other preliminary niceties, she opened the proceedings in that deliberately 'controlled' (those who are sympathetic to the author may choose to substitute `menacing', without straying too far from the truth) tone she employs to barely conceal irritation and/or disappointment (like Aunt Agatha did with Bertie Wooster).

"What flight did you book my mother on"? she queried.  Even as the victim was mildly bewildered as to why on earth her mother - always calm, kind, truly grounded and soft-spoken - had to take flight, the portends slowly sunk into his brain, which was still crackling out of slumber.  His distressed demeanour, akin to that of the veritable deer-in-the-headlight, must have broadcast his confusion with FM clarity --  that the intake rate and comprehension levels were way below par. For she proceeded to clarify by crisply adding: "Flight from Mangalore"?  Now, you must admit that your author is smart as needles otherwise and vividly captures the picture once adequate pointers are provided by the counterpart; but here he was, labouring below peak form under foggy conditions as he was shifting posture from horizantality to perpendicularity for the first time on the day.  Despite all those handicaps, it all came to him in a flash and he remembered that his mother-in-law and brother-in-law were to fly that morning to Bangalore on tickets booked by himself online earlier.  Masterfully suppressing the trepidation that was rising from his stomach-pit, he managed to mumble  "Why, what happened"?  The response was clear, cold and like the knife gliding through soft butter - "They are at the airport and have been told that their tickets are booked for the same date two months later".  All you need to know is they had to buy fresh tickets at an exorbitant price to fly that day and the author's perilously positioned stock nosedived even further on that side of the family. 

That fiasco came about only because this author did not follow the rigour that online booking of tickets demands, without giving one too much leeway to correct mistakes.  Especially if one had looked high and low for tickets for flexible dates and did not conclude the booking process for some reason.  When you return later to triumphantly seal the best deal of the day, you should not assume that the dates of travel you had in mind are captured correctly on Kayak or Jet Airways, whatever.  Remember, two decades back all this work was thrust on the travel agent, who earned his commission doing this for a job.  Now we tend to go over the top, over-analyzing available options online, simply because the entire airline schedule is at our finger tips, literally.  By the time you experiment with all the permutations and combinations of airline, departure time, date, pricing, auspicious day for travel etc, fatigue sets in and you tend to overlook something critical.   For some reason, while booking this ticket, the wrong date was picked for one leg and the rest was misery for one individual, the booker! It was another story that I had to write 100 times, reminiscent of the imposition in school days - doled out as punishment to atone for some misdeed - that "my mother-in-law was obviously welcome at our home any time"!! 

I had no defence the second time this happened, when at the airport we found that our tickets were again for the wrong date and we had to take an unplanned road trip to Madras. I can assure you that had not even the remotest resemblance to the one Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif enjoy in `Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara'.  Another disaster that strikes when some smart alec tries to play the system endlessly to get the best possible deal. A friend lost the last remaining seats for USA on a good flight because he was avaricious enough to wait overnight.  He ended up paying some 60% extra for the same seats when he woke up next morning.

If that was a date-related goof-up, venue-related hiccup is not far behind.  I booked tickets for a movie recently and we presented ourselves at the box-office at the appointed hour to collect the same.  We were flabbergasted to be told that the movie was not showing in that multiplex at all.  Bristling at this nonsense that they would issue tickets for a no-show, I was preparing for an onslaught when something deep inside me demurred. Before my belligerence got the better of me, I checked the ticket and lo and behold, it was for a multiplex with a similar sounding name belonging to the same group, about 15 kms away.  We grinned in embarrassment and bought fresh tickets for another movie and enjoyed it too.  The redeeming feature was that the loss this time was only Rs.200 for two tickets since it was a morning show!!  It was my imbecility alright, lulled into a comfort zone by the oh-so-familiar online platform; I swear it would not have happened, had I gone to the theatre and booked my tickets like in the good old days.  But, let this scribe declare in unequivocal terms that the immense convenience of the new age process beats the old one hands down, no doubt (especially in booking train/event/bus/airline tickets), so long as one is not averse to face up to the occasional discomfiture resulting from errors of commission and omission.

One thing I intensely dislike about some e-commerce portals is the way refunds are handled, assuming clients are dummies.  Even if you had paid by a credit card earlier, they try to take the mickey out of you by crediting the refund to your account with `them' instead of crediting the card account.  That way they believe they are doing smart business because you have to buy something from them again to use the refunded amount and they are not out of funds at all - dual benefits for them.  Somewhat like the practice of toll booths on highways trying to pay you the balance (change) in `chocolates', when one is not even sure whether you are getting the right value back.  Once, when I got 4 chocolates as change, I tried to give them to the next toll both (belonging to the same company) for the same value.  I had to argue for 5 minutes before they got accepted, not because the attendant was convinced by my argument but because of the persistent honking of the drivers behind!!

Now, let me go back to the first mishap mentioned in this blog, the Mangalore-Bangalore ticket for my mother-in-law. When all the hubbub had subsided and I imagined I was clearly out of the danger-zone, I ventured to politely ask my dear wife as to why none of them (she herself, her brother and mother), who had checked the ticket after booking, picked up the error and got it corrected.  Valid question, you would think?  All I got was a benign stare like the one she usually reserves for one of her less-gifted and errant children in school and she asked blithely `Now, trying to shift the blame, are we'??  I knew better than to answer, because all the people involved were from the other side of the family!