Monday, December 11, 2017

Aadhaared

I thought technology would make life easy for me. "Aha! That's what YOU think", they say, and get to work to ensure that life becomes even more complicated.

Take this recent rush of Aadhaar seeding for all investments. (Ah! No! No! 'Bhakts' need not foam at the mouth nor 'sickulars' drool, this has nothing to do with Modi.) I sort of thought that, what with technology and all, linking PAN card with Aadhaar would suffice to ensure that Aadhaar would be linked to all investments because a PAN card has sort of been mandatory for making those investments all along.

No, not so! Well, Government works in mysterious ways and one of those mysterious ways is a penchant for making people enter the same thing in two different places so that they can tick them as being the same. They would feel sort of lost without having to do that ticking - that special sort of reverse tick that seems to have been most of their training on the job!

So, Ok, here I go linking the Aadhaar (seeding Aadhaar they call it. I wonder what sort of tree it will grow into) all over the damn place. Having a memory like a sieve and the organizational ability of a particularly confused moron, I have no track of what I have 'seeded' Aadhaar in and what I have not. Matters are not helped by the fact that most of them reply that it is under process but almost none bother to email if it has been done successfully.

And then comes December, the 31st of which is the last date. I keep receiving emails to link Aadhaar now from almost everyone. I do not know which I have done it for, which I have not and, obviously, I am also worried about which has 'failed' the process. But I am damn sure that SOME of these I HAVE done it for, and successfully. Even with my limited exposure to databases, I know it is a fairly simple process to cull out only those who have NOT seeded Aadhaar and send mails only to them but THAT apparently is not the way they work. Never mind that the 'culling' program would anyway need to be written so that differential treatment may be given to those who have not seeded Aadhar by end-December and never mind that it would make things so much easier on the nerves of the customers that they so ardently seek to serve.

Well - I click on the links, expecting that the form, at least, would show whether Aadhaar has already been seeded or not. No way - there is an unhelpful 'Edit' option to enter/change Aadhaar. Now what? Has Aadhaar been seeded, have I not ever tried to seed Aadhaar for this investment, or has the seeding process failed? No idea. To be on the safe side, I do the process again and NOW the form does not accept the OTP sent by them. Over and over and over! Shit!

There matters lie, with me wondering whether it did not so accept because Aadhaar had already been verified or whether there is some breakdown in the system. Whether this is an investment where I had already seeded Aadhaar and, now, by this process had ended up 'unseeding' it or...

I am a total nervous wreck and all thanks to technology.

Why blame technology, you ask? If only it had been the snail-mail era, without the benefit of all these digital monsters, the same process would have been done manually. Someone would have to type in the letters to 'seed' Aadhaar, someone would have to frank them all - costing them postage - and someone would have to dispatch them. So, they would have found it less work, and less cost, to even laboriously cull only those, who had not seeded Aadhaar already, from their manual registers and send letters only to them. I mean, if YOU had to dispatch only 500 letters instead of 2000, you would have been all for that option.

NOW? It costs you nothing to email, you need to type the letter in only once so why bother to even write a mini-program today (even if you HAVE to do it tomorrow) to cull out that 500 from the 2000?

Nothing - NOTHING - is going to make life easy. Especially not technology! WE will always find a way to ensure stress, all in the name of customer service.

P.S: What?? Extended to March 31? Another 3 months of this customer service? Ye Gods!

8 comments:

  1. Ye Gods! I am willing to wager that is what most Indians must be exclaiming. Why make things easy for the masses when we can needlessly complicate stuff and then see them running from pillar to post... This post had me gri(n)macing as I read on as my memory -- well comparing it to a sieve would be a huge compliment to it. Thanks Suresh.

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  2. Ha ha ha. I didn't want to be aadhared and so cancelled my Hathaway connection. I have no clue why everything including your TV connection needs to be aadhared! I want to resist everything but can't help with a few. So that's that.

    As always enjoyed your SOH thoroughly. Kudos. :)

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  3. Hehe..Adhaared indeed.I wonder too why they keep sending mails to all ! I am now thoroughly confused about my status. Hopefully i won't discover that i have been unceremoniously chucked out of some systems

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  4. I constantly spent my half an hour to read this weblog's content daily along with a cup of coffee.

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