Direct from Dell (to Hell)

No its not a complete, "I hate Dell" post.

I was the student representative for IIM Indore, in handling all the IT problems. I loved it, and liked fixing the varied problems that my classmates, juniors and seniors had. Back then, we had a tie up with Dell for laptops. Roughly at any point of time, at least 70 laptops were there from Dell. The warranty on them had lapsed in a years' time, so ... as Murphy would have it, the problems started cropping up only after then. Thus started the telephone calls over Warranty issues, and the constant bartering ... over warranty given on paper ... then comes the line, read the fine print. I was glad to hand over the ITCom Secretary post to my able junior .. whew!!

Now I do not own a Dell laptop anymore, but two of my colleagues do. Both have malfunctioning laptop batteries and chargers to boot, so the machine refuses to run without AC power and a functioning battery. Ok ... easy solution ... go to support dot dell dot com and raise a request. One month wait for customer care to respond. Fine, lets raise a sales enquiry of purchasing a new battery and a charger ... one month wait for sales to respond. Is the site working anymore?

If you have a website and are making case studies of it in so many b-schools, then can you make sure it works properly; and if it is working properly, then why not respond to the customer, establishing their expectations. No response is a no-no. That has not only resulted in lost sales, but more importantly lost customers. An easier approach would be to sell extended warranty support to them and retain them as customers.

Job hunts!!

I always thought that job hunting would result in instantaneous gratifications ... guess not!!

How's this for a covering letter??

Hi So-and-so,

I am desperately seeking to working in your firm, since I need the money badly. You do not have to issue any work to me since my qualifications can hardly count for naught. No need to revert, your read receipt is counted as your approval.

See you on Monday!!
Your-latest-employee

86400

That's the number of seconds in a day. Its also the name of the latest project that my team is working on. The concept is to sell one product a day, and keep it very simple. We sell to stock, you buy 1 product ... no registration ... product dispatched to you within 3 days.

The site is yet to launch, but you can catch the beta launch here - 86400.

PS - the .com domain was taken ... by a pr0n site!!

Wedding Rush

Not me! This photo I took whilst going home ... looks like someone is late!!

Lazy blogger

I feel the need to change the look and feel of my blog. But I am too lazy :-)

What to do now?

Addendum - Thanks to Biggie's help, I am working on this ... it's WIP, but you will see the blog morphing!!

Some more - Now working on the CSS and the XML, It would be great if someone could give me a nice image to put on the header. Okay, now I am close to tearing my hair out here.

I think I am done!! No comments please, this aint changing!!

Facebook Updates!

I love the way coincidences happen in real life!!

Music Spiral

I am a last.fm user. Been an active user since March 2nd, 2008. For the uninitiated, what last.fm does is it stores my music plays and tastes and also recommends me music which I might like to listen, based on my tastes ... collaborative filtering + social community.

So, they have revamped their site design ... added so many widgets (I had sported some on my blog) ... now they are allowing this data to be accessed through API!! What this means that the gazillions of programmers out there can come out with their own version of add-ons for this application. What that means ... is that there is a big pay load of data to be mined. I saw this music spiral application for instance ... it generates my music spiral (dont ask me what it is) ... it looks pretty.

If you ask me the exact application .. go figure :-)