Now THAT is Customer Service

Life was all fine until one day my Tweetdeck stopped functioning. For anybody who tweets at least a respectable amount, tweeting from the web is a pain that is desperately avoided at all costs. 


But yet, there I was. Tweetdeck: Not working. Twhirl: Not working. Seesmic: Not working. Web: The Only Option!





Installations, Uninstallations are Reinstallations followed. To no avail.


Defeated and done for, I finally gave up, and tweeted that I was about to unistall Tweetdeck and Adobe AIR once and for all.. 


Then, out of nowhere, some guy called Richard Barley tweets me, and says he can help. His Twitter Bio says he's Community Manager (which is..er..) for Tweetdeck. 


In bits and snatches over the rest of the day, he walked me through step by step of troubleshooting Tweetdeck.


Turns out, Twitter updates fail if Internet Explorer is set to 'Work Offline'. Don't ask why. I just saw it happen with my own eyes. 


This made me realize two things. 
1. The beauty of the Internet and Twitter and how a random person can help you out. 


2. How bad Customer Service is here. Especially Chennai I've noticed. Even shopkeepers here don't smile. Half the time it's almost as if they think they're doing US a favour by 'allowing' us to shop there. 


Anyhow, point is, I used to like using Tweetdeck. But after this, I'm a big fan! I guess that's what you call Atta Customer Service!


(Image Courtesy: wp.appadvice.com)

All About Distances

I realized suddenly that I hadn't blogged in some time. Then I told myself, that's probably due to the fact that you've been travelling a lot. 


Traveled how much? I figured I should find the distance between places and then collate them all together. I was pretty sure I would find some tool to do that online. 


And here are the search results. Turns out, all of them turned out to be utterly useless. 







Why?


1. Google Maps only give you straight line distances, and it's too much of a hassle to actually sit and trace the outline of highways. (Yes, I'm not THAT jobless!)


2. The 'I-make-your-job-easy' place to place distance calculators were good, but for the fact that they did not have two cities I traveled to listed. Mananthavady in Wyanad and Gokharna in Karnataka (towns, cities, what's the difference anyhow?!) But they did have distances for journeys like Cochin - Chennai, Chennai - Bangalore etc. 


In the end, desperate and as jobless as I was, I decided to resort to the one thing that has got me past countless Math exams (barely).


Guesswork. 


So, (drumroll), the final answer would seem to be that I have traveled 3438 Kilometers in the last month. It might not seem much, but it's a first for me anyhow.


To put some perspective on that distance, supposing I was a bird, and at Kanyakumari, if I had flown North, I'd have gone past Kashmir if I had traveled the same distance. (Yeah I know, birds fly South this time of the year, but hey, what kinda bird writes blog posts anyhow!)


(Image Courtesy : wikimedia.org)