All Eez Well...

Just a short post, this; a follow up from my earlier post on my war against the pesky tele-marketing flies that seem to get into our cellular phones with annoying regularity these days.

First, meet my Commander-in-chief in battle, the

In the week that I've had the software I wrote about on my device, it has stopped 69 unwanted smses and 1 unwanted call.

Unless they're paying some kids somewhere to send me fake marketing smses (to prove their own efficiency :-), I'd say the software has pretty much already paid for it's keep.

Mobiwatchman is made by a Pune-based Indian company called Optinno. At Rs.200 (less than $5) for a license, it's value for money, true paisa wasool.

It has many customisable features - rules you can set up about who gets into your mobile and who doesn't - but its been a busy work week and I've had little time to play around with the more advanced features.

Yet, even the simplest feature, of blocking anyone not in my phonebook from sending me smses, has saved me so much mind space in the last week, I'm moved to give it a high thumbs up.

Other than the unwanted messages kept out, when I got calls from numbers not stored in my phonebook, it warned me that 'suspicious' callers were trying to reach me. At the end of the call, it offered me the option of either blacklisting them or branding them as trusted.

One of these calls was from a telemarketer, and I blacklisted her. This feature proved to be effective within the next 5 minutes, when, as often happens with these morons with lists of numbers to call each day, I got called again, from the same number, and my Mobiwatchman automatically rejected the call after the first ring...ah, sweet justice, without having to be rude to the moron :-)

I'll let you know if my watchman develops any bad habits (falling asleep on the job, getting drunk, flirting with the maids... the usual 'security-wala' problems :-) as the days go by.

For now, I'm enjoying the peace, knowing there's a good man on patrol. Cheers!

Blood Circulation...

Time to give back? :-)

Just a nice experience I thought I'd share with you guys.

P and I donated blood on Sunday. No urgent need, no friends or relatives in hospital...just that a social service and cultural activities club that we'd been part of in our 'youth' was in revival mode and was holding a Blood Donation Camp in Kolkata. We decided to join in from where we were, in red solidarity :-)

Nothing extra-ordinary about our intent or action, I'm just writing to share a couple of nice things from the experience. One, it feels good. You see the warm red stuff come out of your arm and fill a bag and you know its going to help someone in need. Simple and effective. My kind of good deed.

Two, in our search to find a place that would let us do our bit without leaving a bad taste in our mouths, we picked the Max Devki Devi Super Specialty Hospital in Saket.

I'd been to the institution once earlier, and had not had a good experience.

It struck me as large, rich, impersonal, out to suck money in the fine way that corporate medicine (and Indian corporate education institutions) have made their trademark. As if the overpriced medical services and the ill-informed staff were not enough, the bitter cherry on it all was the Rs.30/- parking ticket, that too after having had to drive around for 15 minutes and park a good half kilometer away from where I needed to go (valet parking available at Rs.60 :-)

And yet, we returned, this time, to give voluntarily...simply because, of the Red Cross Society- approved Blood Banks, this was most conveniently located from our home and seemed to offer at least the level of cleanliness and hygiene that can be critical in endeavors involving blood.

So, with mixed feelings, we set out on Sunday morning, after breakfast. And I'm glad to report that we were pleasantly surprised, till almost the very end of our outing.

The parking guy at the entry gate let us double park in netural gear, when he learnt that we were looking for the Blood Bank, to make a voluntary donation. After this, we were guided courteously to our destination, welcomed by a pleasant doctor, who after checking our BP, sent us on to a nice, professional nurse (rare, non-mallu at that :-)

The form-filling was painless, as was the the actual blood donation. The facility was neat, the air-conditioning worked fine, the blood collection bag and needle were sterilised and pre-sealed, the support staff knew what they were doing, right down to disposing the medical waste from the procedure in the correctly labelled, separate bio-waste bins.

The whole thing was done professionally and after we had each shed 450 ml, we were given light refreshments, caps & mugs with blood donation slogans on them and thank-you letters from the Hospital.

P wondered if all this was too good to be true and wanted to know if our blood would end up being 'sold' by the big bad corporate. What the nurse told us, without any hesitation, was that voluntary blood donations go to either poor people, who often came there without enough resources or to foreign patients, who came without relatives or friends who could act as donors.

I can't honestly say that this answered her question fully, but there was no attempt to hide anything and we decided to accept it at face value.

When we stepped out of the hospital building, having done the deed we set out to, less than 50 minutes had passed since we'd stepped in. Pretty good, no? We still had the daylight 30-rupee parking robbery to remind us of where we were, but we were not going to let that spoil the whole experience.

I think a lot of people who would like to / be willing to donate blood, if the they could have the same sort of pleasant experience that P and I had this Sunday. What do you say?

As for me, I've known I could donate blood every 3 months; for the first time though, I think I actually might.

Spamming Me Softly...

This week's Outlook magazine has electronic invasion of our privacy as it's cover story.

In today's uber connected world, it's hardly surprising that we've got folks encroaching into our personal space with annoying regularity. Spam in our e-mail inbox is almost passe now, despite ever evolving, heuristic, spam mail blockers.

My pet peeve though, is when people get into my cell phone.

The mobile is a constant companion in today's world and when people intrude through that omnipresent device, it goes beyond annoying.

If you live in India (and you're not in the ultra-minority of people likely to have access to this blog and yet not use a mobile phone :-), you've know what I'm talking about. We've all had more than our fair share of tele-marketing calls and text messages.

Over the past two months, it's been people texting me to buy "best location flats" and an "amazing breakthrough German power saving device". They also call me regularly to enquire about my non-existent "personal loan requirement (sic)".

I'd made my peace with upto 3 such irritating short messages & 1 call per day (the latter is the dramatically reduced number, after my registering with the national DND - Do Not Disturb service) , but when the nuisance stats doubled and that too, at odd hours, I decided to act.

Round One, I called the Hurt Line at Airtel. The usual call center moron took me through a script on his screen, the relevant part of which went something like this:

Airtel Hurt Line Associate (Ah-A): "Sir, you have to give us the number of the sender and the date & time you received the sms. Then we will send the block request to the vendor. It will take 7 to 10 days to process your request."

Me: "But the sms doesn't come from a number. It says 'TM-Paras', 'TD-German' and stuff like this...and it comes from different names every day..."

Ah-a: (Silence) "Can I place your call on hold sir? (while you listen to the expensive A.R.Rehman Airtel signature tune you're paying for?)"

Me: "Sure (as if I have a choice)"

Ah-a: (After 3-odd minutes) "Thank you for being on hold sir...sir I would like to inform you that we need the phone number of the sender and the date & time you received the sms sir..."

Me: "But...isin't that exactly the same as what you told me before putting me on hold?"

Ah-a: "Exactly sir !"

I ended the call before It could ask me if there was anything else It could annoy me with today.

Round Two, I was on my own. Google searches led to others like me, aggrieved Indians, but mostly, helpless. Apparently, these 'TM' and 'TD' marketeers were using the www to sms us, so that explained the no sender phone-number.More questions than answers.

There were quite a few 'unwanted-sms-and- call- blocker' softwares on offer, but most of them from companies based outside India, who wanted upwards of $15 or so for a license...

...and even if I was ready to pay, they had caveat emptor clauses for networks outside Europe and the USA. They probably knew that Indian/Chinese/Paki tele-marketeers, like all other Indian/Chinese/Paki enterpreneurs, would figure out loopholes in their software and go on to beat them (while, in my mind's eye, doing the famous sub-continent yes-no combined head shake and smug smile :-) Hmm...

But my sense of fair play had been trod upon and when that happens, I can be quite persistent, in my efforts to restore my world to some semblance of balance.

The good news: I may have found an Indian answer (at an Indian price :-), which i will write about in a near future post.

For now, I just wanted to share with you that in first 3 days of the trial period, the Indian software has automatically blocked text messages from anyone not in my phonebook. It also prompts me about 'suspicious' calls that I may want to block, in the future. What's more, it claims to have an intelligent algorithm that will learn with each sms/caller I block. So far, so good.

Once I vote for it with my wallet past the trial period, I will blog again. The" TMs" and "TDs" may have won the battle, but I've signed up for the war. So, here's my short message for them: Boo! :-)