A story in rediff reminded me of the decision I should implement with HSBC credit card. For long time in US as well as India I did not want a credit card and did not posses one. It was a blissful life, most of the things could be accomplished through the debit card and official work could be done through the corporate card. My experience with the credit card is two fold –
1. It gives inflates sense of buying power.
2. The sub-clauses, fine print is all convoluted and against the customer. In India recently it was reported that most of the banks process the payments slowy so as to “levy” the charges etc.
In my case in month of april 2007 I knew I had overspent and did not want to delay the payment so dropped the payment for that month earlier than 10th april, which somehow the company failed to connect to me and came back after the due date to ask for another cheque and I was told no late payment fees etc will be charged. They took another cheque for same amount. By that time I came to know I have been charged late fees and something etc. This is after confronting on 22nd april about earlier cheque not being encashed by them or the fact that latter cheque too has been given.
I have decided to end the card and not plan to get another. Reason – no timely statement, no timely encashment of cheques given on time.
Filed under: Service Experience
Other day as I am prone to do, I was visiting the bookshop in jayanagar and planning to spend time and money on books. I saw one of the books which I wanted to buy for long time but was apalled to see the quality of the publication. It was horrible compared to regular copy you can get on corner. (It is not mainstream book, otherwise a copy would have been available). Here I am ready to pay a good price for a book but unable to get the complete feel and look and instead being served with bad version. I decided not to buy the book. Heck Amar chitra katha is printed on better pages. This all links into Ani’s discussion about developing bric nations getting raw deal/standards for similar things.
Filed under: Reading, Service Experience
After Chetanya went ahead and published the links to Ani’s hard work, I had to step up give him the push. What Ani/self had done was to collect information about staying costs across general activities and provide an idea to many of the folks who might have that question. This is Bangalore specific and data wrt rent can go down depending on where you stay in Bangalore.
In general Bangalore is very expensive compared to other metros. The apartment sizes are reducing and many of the folks have mutliple flats etc which are being rented out at exhorbitant rates. Prices are coming down but since money flows here from rich Telugu land, malabar land, Tamizh area real estate prices have maintained high peak. The infrastructure status is such that any thing which gets done – is good thing.
Filed under: Buying apartment, Service Experience
After visiting non0science (nOnoScience) (via Suhasini) for few times I have decided to put him into the blogroll as the writing is witty, diverse and has more depth. I finished reading Stephen Few. After waiting for Tufte’s book I went through this book which criticized modern “dashboards”, reports presentation and came out with winning colors wrt to dashboard information presentation. I needed something like this for long time after being frustrated with loads of data and lack of good representation techniques. So hopefully in the current project we will be able to come up with better looking, more impactful dashboard which can provide insight.
Via nOnoscience - I picked up Mohan’s site which provided John Hick’s enjoyable paper on Web Typography. I found wonderful chart from Stephan Few’s site with good way of presenting information.
Good smiles of the week follow
1. Somehow I have stumbled on balancing life and had the heartiest laugh in long time. Very -2 nicely written and invokes all the memories of the ncc camp.
2. Situational vegetarian habits had me in split. I concur – no logic suffices in most situations. Post on Rahman - bring back the similar memories – actually I always maintained the doubts about Rahman till Guru Sridhar made me listen to May maadham about sometimes crappy work like ” Rukumani Rukumani” (think of Mani rathnam picturising it)”. I guess the translated Hindi lyrics turned out to be the most unthinkable I had heard to date in those days.
Filed under: Travel, visualization
, so the post.