Internet woes

Internet woes

I would like to share one of my experiences of what I suppose is the great Indian phenomenon, the absence of accountability. The story told has zero fabrications and without from reality .It happens so that in our hostel rooms there is a sort of arrangement where you can get an internet connection by paying 250 bucks per month. Now the arrangement looked attractive and many, including yours truly signed up for the offer. Cash exchanged hands, cables snaked from the hubs to the rooms and everything seemed hunky dory. But as with all good things, this too was destined to end. And so by some preordained design,when I was savoring the joys of the web for barely two weeks the connection gave up the ghost. I poked about here and there and for the life of me was unable to change the status. The formerly blinking light on the LAN card, an indicator of its vitality was gone. Even after several attempts to revive it which consisted of pulling out the card from its slot and putting it back again and changing slots, some common remedies did not yield any results I had to accept the inevitable –my card was now only a piece of silicon without any function.

So I turned my steps towards our local dealer and after some haggling was the proud owner of a brand new card. Thinking now that my problem was solved, I went through the required preliminaries and sat back to savor the joys of the World Wide Web. But what was this! Let alone the internet I could see only my computer name in the whole network of our hostel computers. Now this seemed to be a more serious matter. Some more poking about and I isolated the snafu, a defective cable. Now the thing was taken out of my hands. All I could do was to contact the service provider, give him my location and wait for him, which I am still doing .Nothing has happened, except for some five more phone calls from my side and his standard reply-Aapka room aur hostel no kya hai? Theek hai kaal aa jaonga.

And I 'm still waiting for the "kaal"to come. This stuff happened two weeks ago and frankly speaking, for someone who is used to the net as I’m, these days have been painful, like waking up after uncontrolled partying with a shitty hangover and a migraine to boot. And so I have learned the hard way that lack of competition breeds incompetence and sloth. And a host of others. Starting alphabetically, you might pick accountability.