The dark side of consumer encounters

Mismanagement, like corruption, is a highly contagious disease

It’s a sellers’ market out there and a new customer quickly ‘metamorphoses’ into an insect (perhaps the lowly cockroach) for the company selling the product. honestly (and one might immediately be confronted with the question, why bring that up?), the everyday life of the average citizen of this country has turned into a sort of Kafkaesque hell. The clairvoyant and tormented Prague Jewish writer has become synonymous with the bureaucratic absurdities and technology-driven inhumanity to come later on in the twentieth century, and some surmise he may even have had a vision of the Nazi concentration camps where millions were to perish only a decade after his premature death from tuberculosis. Franz Kafka would no doubt have felt quite at home and at ease in our society and, with the abundance of bizarre subject matter available to him, might well be a much more prolific writer. every day here brings some new horror, some grotesque item in the newspapers or the television channels, some numbing event, odd reaction or loony behaviour personally experienced, but in every situation the common man is treated as lower than vermin, little more than a cockroach to be stubbed contemptuously under the boots of the stronger.

The pride of place for excesses against the ordinary citizen must rest with the police, as its notorious thana culture is well-entrenched, its unspeakable physical tortures of the Inquisition type conveniently tolerated by the powers-that-be, and to dislodge it from this pedestal of dubious distinction would be a be a formidable task indeed for the man of reformist bent. Its talent for monstrosity, money making and incompetence remains supreme and unrivalled. And close behind it, skilled in tortures of the psychical variation, come the floundering utility companies, the arch-fiends of hair-tearing stress and anxiety for their consumers, especially the small fry. The monthly electricity bill, for instance, is a veritable First Folio of myriad taxes (including the ridiculous television fee, courtesy the slavish Pakistan Television Corporation) and camouflaged over-billing is rampant. The telephone company, of its own volition, and without consulting the’ target’ consumer, is much given to imposing a new package on the unwary every other month, dedicated to raising its earnings with the same level of landline usage. The amount of tax on the inaptly termed ‘easyload’ of mobile phones is scandalous at twenty five per cent, it can hardly be easy on the consumers’ tattered finances! The gas company will send an erroneously inflated bill, and even if it acknowledges that it was due to an office fault, is loath to say the magic word ‘sorry’ to the agitated consumer who has been forced to knock at the company’s shabby office, usually located in a distant and apparently wellhidden location. And as for the water utility, it seems as if it would be going out of business before too long. The potable (euphemistically speaking) water in an urban area, including the so-called posh ones, may suddenly cease to flow and the tap will turn into an orchestral instrument, giving off all discord of sounds, from whistles of varying pitch, to chocking and gurgling noises, and even a low continuous hum. When one inquires as to the cause from the relevant office, it turns out that the transformer (that arch-culprit of summer) has conked out, or that the motor extracting the water is out of order. Why it takes three days to get the situation back to normal (again using the word liberally) remains a mystery amid the tangle of excuses trotted out by the company functionaries. In fact, an apologetic petty bureaucrat of a utility, even if conscious of a glaring mistake on the company’s part, will be hard to find in our environment. When all is said (or shouted) and done, it is always somehow the fault of the stressed consumer, who is ‘exploiting’ the matter, being ‘oversensitive’, ‘saying the wrong thing’, and a million variations of this theme. But not a word on the question of the mistakes clearly committed by the employees’ during the course of their duties, especially in meter reading, which can take ‘many‘ forms and in turning a blind eye towards illegal goings-on for a ‘consideration’.

The local concept of customer service remains primitive, apathetic and dismissive. Once the cash register rings out, the buyer of a good or a service is immediately relegated to second or third class status in the eyes of the vendor. The key word that describes him is hapless. This is also the case in private local trading, as every ripped-off ordinary citizen knows only too well. Sadly, managerial shoddiness appears to be spreading to the Big Boys, to the multinational sector as well. It is said that one rotten apple spoils the rest but in our scenario, the reverse seems to hold true: the innumerable rotten apples are spoiling the few remaining good ones. Mismanagement, like corruption, is a highly contagious disease. And so we come to the miserable current state of the telecommunications company World Call, the local subsidiary of Oman Telecommunication Company. And thereby hangs a tale… On the sixth of April, one renewed one’s subscription with WorldCall for two months as usual, the weather on that day was pleasant in Lahore and a light rain was falling. This apparently confused and unconnected statement requires clarification, and it is this. First, over the many years that one has been a WorldCall television cable subscriber, one was struck by the gradual decline in the once-excellent service standard of this organisation and had consequently reduced one’s subscription period to two months maximum, as if by instinct, to cut losses, so to speak. The light rain that was falling meant that when one turned on the television set at home that evening, there would be no cable for sure, as the apparently obsolete WorldCall equipment was particularly allergic to even a fine drizzle and packed up (it was always termed an ‘area problem’), as is indeed the case with the transformers of the Lahore electric Supply Company, which also suffer from the same nervous ‘moisture syndrome’. Incidentally, both also suffer typical ‘heat stroke’ symptoms when, in the height of summer, the ultra-violet ray is at its deadliest.

And so it proved. No cable when one turned on the television, numerous complaints, holding on the consumer helpline line for what seemed ages and occasionally being compelled to hang up unheard, while a recorded voice sang the praises of the company products, then three days later a desperate series of personal visit to the relevant office and what one got was still not service but a startling shock. Apparently the employees had not been paid their salaries for a couple of months (an all too human failing, common among some newspaper proprietors also) and were observing a sit-down strike, refusing to attend to their duties unless they saw the company cash. Over the following days, there were several rumours of the salaries being paid on such and such a date and the repair service being restarted (which invariably turned out to be false), or that the company was in the midst of a take-over bid by a local, say we say, educational (but reportedly un educated) entrepreneur and media mogul, but nothing of this development appeared formally. A recourse to the internet websites and the relevant audit reports revealed the stark truth: the company was suffering losses of billions of rupees and its current liabilities exceeded its present assets by an astronomical sum.

And so, even as the justly distressed employees remained idle since the start of the month, the television cable which had gone off the airwaves on the sixth of April, could only be restored on the nineteenth of April, that is, after a lapse of two weeks, and after being bounced from one office to another like a football, in the process! The combined complaints for the city must have numbered in the thousands in this period. The worrying aspect was that the concerned subscriber, trapped in the middle of the tangle, could do absolutely nothing but sit on a prayer mat and entreat higher Powers to intervene and send down manna from heaven, so that the employees could be paid and the repair work resumed. Or to start screaming, ‘The world is calling…where is WorldCall’?, duly qualified with a couple of juicy Punjabi expletives. Two weeks without the idiot box is enough to drive one nuts, as one sheepishly found out. Incidentally, the only other cable operator in one’s vicinity, operating from dingy offices, started playing hard to get by jacking up his own installation fees manifold, in order to make a killing from the WorldCall disruption. That cannibalistic mindset is also true to form.

So, it turned out to be quite an ‘April Fool’s Month’ and indeed the cruellest month for the unfortunate cable customers (or suckers?) of this multinational company. The beauty or the bitter irony of this situation is that as long as the cable feed continued unabated, all was fine, and the poor subscribers become aware of the deep rot within only after a fault developed in their cable supply, after which they could do nothing but display a saintly patience. Postscript: On being informed that there was another office of WorldCall, housing the company Brahmins or bigwigs where redress might be sought, an elderly customer ventured to visit that far away place also. But he only learnt that along with financial insolvency, the company was also apparently morally bankrupt.

The brash young security incharge at the entrance gate behaved in a most brusque and rude manner, and even ordered the menacing security guards to throw the complainant customer out of the premises. Only the chance timely intervention of another company official averted an ugly situation. Shame on you, WorldCall, three billion times, which is the approximate reported amount in rupees of your losses till the end of September 2015. Poetic justice, I say, and an apt instance of cause and effect.

But to be fair there were some company employees who did try to help one out of the apparently insoluble dilemma by their sympathy and advice. The company’s Brahmins clearly have their work cut out if the entertainment organisation is to be salvaged and the shaken customer goodwill and investor confidence restored. Also, what we desperately need here is an idealist consumer-protection group, such as the pioneering Ralph Nader and his Raiders in the United States of the 1970s