It has been a long time since I last blogged, I was just waiting for something which would ring the right cord for me to get back. And here were are, BSNL and their staff always help me getting something to write about, hope to get back with at least one post a week.

Around mid-February I had disconnected my BSNL NIC card connection and had moved to broadband offering from the same provider. Now 4 months down the lane, I am yet to get the Security Deposit and the 10 days additional amount I had paid as rent back.

Getting back the money which was paid as security deposit is looking as much tough as it was to get the device working when I initially took the connection, at that time I had to run around their office every other day asking them for them to get it working. The whole thing is documented read – BSNL NIC Card and Customer Support.

Now that I am facing these many issues in getting back my own money, I thought of documenting this too. The story thus far is:

Feb 19, 2010 : I give a letter to BSNL CSC, Shakarapuram to disconnect my NIC device and handover the device to them.

May 29, 2010 10:30am: Three months are over so head over to their accounts department in DVG road to ask them when I can expect my money back. Once I reach there, they make me wait for 15 minutes and then tell me that for NIC card (which falls under WLL) I would have to contact their office in Palace Road. They point me towards the wall which has the numbers to be contacted. The numbers were 22355772, 22355771 and 22355773. There was an additional number of a JAO 22931179.

May 29, 2010 11:30am: I called at 22355772 to be told that the file has not arrived and they cannot do anything till the file reaches them and the line was disconnected without any opportunity for me to speak.

May 29, 2010 11:45am : Still with hopes I contacted the Junior Accounts Officer’s number (22931179). The person who received the call who I think was the JAO told me that he was not sure and needed to check, so asked me to call back after 10 minutes.

May 29, 2010 12:00pm – 1:00pm : I keep on trying, the number is always busy.

May 29, 2010 4:00pm – 4:30pm : The number is still busy.

May 29, 2010 4:45pm : Finally manage to get through and was told that they have not received the file and they cannot do anything till they receive the file. He tells me that he will send a note to the department from where he is to get the file and at the same time asked me to call them at the numbers 22205392 and 22875567. As it was already 5pm, I thought there was no point in calling the number so kept it pending for the coming week.

June 19th 4:15pm: After missing out on calling them on 5th June and 12th June. I called the JAO directly again. This time he asked me if I had called earlier, I told yes, he told that the file had not yet come and he cannot do anything till the file is received. He mentioned that there are many such complaints and he keeps sending these details to the department concerned but for action it is best if I call them. So he again gives me the number 22205392.

June 19th 4:30pm: Called 22205392, a lady picked up the call and even before I could tell my issue completely; cutting me off she told me to contact the number 22282000 which is of her assistant. Called the number but no one picked up, kept calling till 5pm, but no luck.

So much struggle, already spent over 2 hours of my time on this. Now wonder what would have happened if I do the same to them and do not pay the bill for a couple of months, will they sleep on it. No way, they have 10% penalty if one misses a payment date and disconnection follows. So why this laziness to return back the money they taken from people?

Only thing that makes me laugh each time I visit one of their offices or call them is that they always have network problem or their servers will be too slow for the office staff to work. This for a company which goes by the tag line “Connection India”. A quick suggestion to folks at BSNL, start internally so that people do not have to run around from one office to another to get their grievances addressed then think about India.

That’s the story till now, Next time I call if they give me another number I know which number to ask for “Consumer Court”. What do you think folks, when will I get back my money?

Exactly one year back on 19th of January my blog post on my trip to Shivagange Betta was published as an article in Bangalore Mirror newspaper. For those you missed reading/seeing it you can read it at On Top of Shivagange. Or if you would like to see the actual representation of the article as it appear in the newspaper with all the photos, view the pdf On Top of Shivagange (PDF).

Do write your comments below.

Last week my BSNL CDMA based internet connection (NIC Card) was giving very slow speeds of around 1KBps. So I needed to call the BSNL people to register a complaint. Here are the telephone numbers that I came across (for my future reference):

[1] 080 – 28450010
[2] 080 – 28450410
[3] 080 – 28450420

All the numbers seem to be diverted to some other number and were mainly busy all the time. After a couple of tries a person lifted the phone (with number end 010). He listened to my problem and told me to report it to another number, which is mentioned below:
080 – 22385969

The above number looks to be some call center but might be of a technician, don’t know. He told me a solution wherein I needed to take my data card to their Customer Service Center and get some configuration changes done. I didn’t care to implement as I was sure it was not the problem. So I asked him if that does not work what should I do? His reply was upgrade to EVDO.

The solutions provided involved just looking at the issue at customer end instead of looking at the issue as some problem with their infrastructure, hence they provide options which involve me running around to the Customer Service Center or buying a new EVDO device.

Anyways since yesterday I am back to normal speed. So no issues at the moment.

I have been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, but lately I had been facing a issue of Firefox taking around 5-10 seconds to exit when I closed it. I had been lazy to look up and resolve this issue, but today I finally got down to it.

After searching and reading lots of sites, wherein most of them pointed to some issue with the extensions. So one option was to disable all the extensions and enable them one by one and test to see which one was causing the problem. But this would take a lot of time. And most of the sites had users who mentioned the extensions they were using and they had tested them, so all the extensions I use were listed there. So I was pretty much sure extensions were not an issue.

Then on one site it was mentioned that this could be caused by a plugin like Flash. This is when I noticed that I had only a couple of plugins and I could test them in one go. So I disabled the Picasa plugin which I do not use much and restarted Firefox. Then closed it. Poof! It was gone immediately.

To confirm I open Firefox again, loaded a few pages closed some of them and exited Firefox again. Again, Poof! Immediately closed. So the slow exit was caused by the Picasa plugin which I was using. So much for the issues, one small plugin can cause so much slowdown in shutdown of an application. Looking forward to the next release of Firefox viz., 3.6. Hear it is a lot faster. Happy Browsing till then.

Tired of seeing the new mail alerts in Thunderbird which is inconsistent with the other alerts in your Ubuntu based system and want to use the Ubuntu’s libnotify based notification system.. Then there is good news for you, there is a project going on which is currently in beta stage which provides a add-on which will display notification messages using the libnotify library which is used in the Ubuntu Notification System. You can find the add-on at Libnotify for Mozilla.

The add-on is more useful if you are like me who has multiple email accounts managed by Thunderbird. Using the native Thunderbird mail alert, it always using to show the details of the first mail account which receives the mail.

For example if I have two mail accounts GMail and Yahoo!, and I receive two mails in my GMail account, it would have shown ‘You have received 2 mails in GMail’, and subsequently when I get a mail in Yahoo! it would have shown the alert ‘You have received 0 mails in GMail’. This is a know bug which has been open for a long time. But when I used this add-on it worked like charm. No issues at all with multiple mail accounts. Thanks to the developers for this add-on.

Get it from : Libnotify for Mozilla