Gone are the days when there used to be one or two mobile service providers and the customers are stuck with the woes of monopoly. We have lots of options these days from scores of providers providing kick ass bill plans in both Postpaid and Prepaid forms.

After moving to Gurgaon, I required a local number. Since I would be staying here for a while, I decided to take up a Postpaid local GSM SIM. It always starts with the market survey and the existing provider always gets the advantage. So I contacted AirTel, my existing service provider to move my relocate the connection to Gurgaon. I was pretty upset to find out they could not provide me a comparable plan. But I think thats the story for another day.

While AirTel was taking an excessive amount of time to relocate the connection, I decided to try out other options. I was strictly against Vodafone, Reliance and Tata Indicom. So the other options left were Aircel and IDEA. Filled up a form for a new connection on their website and got a call the very next day from one of the Agencies offering an IDEA connection. I was pretty impressed by the turn around time since the ‘IDEA guy’, Sachin Goel (Mobile Number: +919990925333), was in my office with his brilliant ideas that very morning within 2 hours of making the call. He committed to get the connection provisioned before evening and offered me a plethora of choices of numbers. He asked for Rs. 250 as security deposit to which I refused and asked him to charge me in the first bill.

Now the actual story starts. As per his commitment, the SIM was supposed to be provisioned before 2100 hrs. I was unable to understand how he could possibly get the connection activated without a verification done on the billing address. At 2130 hrs, I gave him a call asking about the status of the provisioning as on dialing the number offered to me, the response was ‘Invalid Number’. His response was, he was unable to deposit the form as it was raining. Nevertheless, he said he is going to get it done the next day, a Friday.

The next day his phone was unreachable the whole day. When I was finally able to call him at about 1930 hours, his response was he was unable to do it because he was too busy picking up other connections. When I told him that this was not as per his commitment, his response was “SIM tor ke phek dijiye” (Break the SIM and throw it away) and hung up on my face.

Now, generally the story ends here when the subscriber breaks the SIM and throws away promising himself he will never look IDEA’s way. However for me the worse was yet to come. The following day, Sachin called back and apologized for his behaviour yesterday as he was having some personal problems. I am generally pretty short on patience, but still I decided to give him a chance. He again promised to get the number provisioned by the end of the day, Saturday. While I didn’t expect anything to change drastically, the number given to me remained invalid.

The final blow happened today. In the morning I got a call from someone who claimed to be calling from IDEA. He was doing a verification call for my connection. I finally started believing that my number would finally be provisioned. However in the afternoon Sachin called me and said that he will not be able to give me the number which he initially committed because it has already been given to someone else. Strangely, the dialling the number still says that the number does not exist which clearly indicates that the number is still available. Now I finally broke the SIM and threw it away.

Lessons learnt:

• Stay as far away from IDEA as possible. They are going to screw up big time.
• Never pay for installation charges in cash. If some providers insist on installation charges, (sometimes they even promise to refund the amount in the first bill, ask them to charge it to the first bill. You have your amount insured
• If the above is not possible, at least try to pay by a cheque. You can stop payment it anytime

What a third grade bogus IDEA SirJI

Update 1: I posted the link to this blog on the FaceBook page as well as Twitter page of IDEA Cellular. Neither they responded back, nor they bothered to delete the post. Looks like they just don’t bother about their  image with the customers. I would definitely not like to subscribe with such a company.

Update 2: This one is just for fun. I even posted to the Twitter page of Abhishek Bachchan. Even he didn’t bother to respond. Not that I expected a response, but this definitely implies that he is only interested in the money he earns from being the brand ambassador for a company and least bothered about his own image.