We woke up early to go to Dream Valley by 10am so we would be there when the unpackers arrived. Also R and I wanted time to work out a game plan for all our stuff....just unpacking what is necessary for a year, and keeping all the other stuff in boxes. We figured out a plan and waited for the crew to arrive....10am...10.30am...11am...11.30am...no sign of the guys. So we called the local shipping agent to find out what the delay was, and were told they wouldn't be coming since we hadn't paid for unpacking services!!! WHAAAAATTTTT?????? So we called the Chennai office (since Hyderabad gets their orders from Chennai) and spoke to the guy in charge, Mr. Narayanan. Mr.N said he couldn't instruct his crew to unpack till he had got his orders from the US agent after he could confirm we had paid. I was tempted to call our shipping agent Mr.Tandon in the US (it would have been 2am in the morning for him) but instead i called my dad, had him pull up an e mail from our e mail a/c confriming we had paid, and e mail it to the Chennai office. Raghavan called Mr.N and told him to check his emails which he did. That wasn't enough proof of our having paid for Mr.N. At this point, i took over the phone conversation....typically male officials in India are not used to being ordered by women........I told him to send the crew over within the hour and i would e mail him a scanned copy of the check we had paid with. He sort of wavered a little bit and then relented and said we could expect the guys by 3.30pm.
At this time it was 1pm, so we sort of hung around unpacking some boxes...3pm...3.30pm...4pm..4.30pm....same thing! No sign of the guys. So in utter disgust i called Mr.N again and told him we were leaving and we would expect the crew tomorrow at 10am....! We went home in total disgust. At about 5.30pm we got a call from one of the crew guys to say they were at the house ready to unpack!!!! Obviously Mr.N failed to notify the Hyderabad office that we had left for the day!
$#@%&*%$#aaarrrggghhh!!!!!
All in all it was a pretty useless day...didn't really accomplish much!
2 comments:
Great Blog.I enjoyed it all.
It had been a while since I'd caught up with the two of you. Good to hear you're still alive and getting through the "US to India" transition. Still miss you! Make sure you keep posting, we do want to keep hearing how you're both doing. (Besides it's really an education for us as well.)
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