Thursday, August 7, 2008

Only in India

We have this automated bill payment machine from Vodafone in our office. It works fairly well, you enter your number, it connects over the GSM network to the server and retrieves your bill details. You then have the option of paying by cash/cheque or swiping your credit card. All of this works pretty well. The craziness, however, starts after you have paid the bill. Vodafone has employed a person to record the details of your payment on a sheet of paper. He even has columns for recording the number of notes that you insert (10, 20, 50, 100, 500, wonder what he would do if you paid with a 1000 rupee note).

I wonder what prompted such a system, a distrust of technology or the abundance of cheap labour?