Amazon.in Says: Be Polite Even when you do not get what you ordered!

When your sister orders a set of 2 Rakhis and asks a box of Ferraro Rocher to be sent along with it to you (see the order at amazon.in) You expect exactly that.

However what you get is a set of 2 Rakhis but a poorly packed set of 10, INR 10 Cadbury Milk Chocolates. You feel that it is not right and feel let down. 

When you do not get what you expect you try to see what can be done!  

And you do the next best thing, write to the person who sold this through amazon.in, in this case maalpani. You get no reply for almost a month.

You then try to see if Amazon can help. But then by now as all of us know, it is just impossible to reach amazon.in. Do they have a customer care at all? Or is it just the bots who are sending out mails which means it things go well, they work good but when you have a problem there is no one to solve it.

Then you think let me write a feedback on amazon.in so that other customers like you do not get into the same problem. You try to mildly say that you felt cheated and load the review. Amazon bot does not like it! See the picture below. Guess CHEAT is the word that is not acceptable (it is another thing that the seller can actually cheat! - you just can not have the word cheat in the review!)

Guess the Amazon bot thinks that use of words "CHEAT" is not polite.

 

Then you figure out that probably the same seller maalpani sells on ebay also. You expect a web page and some googling shows that http://www.maalpani.com/ is a possible website. And lo what you get is a  "403: Forbidden This page cannot be displayed" error.

Wonder if amazon-bot had access to all this background would it still classify this as a unacceptable review?

Ola Share | Is it safe?

No I am not talking if it is safe from the perspective of with whom (stranger) I will share the cab with but from the angle of road safety.

Ola Share is something I experienced for the first time the other day. Two interesting things (a) Technologically and (b) Economically it sounded a great idea.  Technologically because the machine is able to match people requirement and the path of the cab and make sure that it put strangers who might be travelling along the same route into a single cab and economically because it burns less fuel, saves the passenger full fare of the cab. 

Sharing a taxi or an autorickshaw (or auto for short) in Mumbai or several cities in India is not new; has been used by people for ages. Very often either the destination or the boarding place of all the passengers is common. Which means the auto picks up all the passengers from a location A (say a railway station) and drops them at location B, location C and location D etc ... making sure that A-B-C-D-... are in some form connected. Most often these shared-auto routes are fixed! No deviations allowed. This is green to the country, economic to passenger.

Ola Share (and UberPool I guess is same as Ola Share) is different. It is less rigid and more flexible in terms of once a person books a can say from location A to location X, any other person who is in the motorable path between A and X can share the ride. Say a person at a location B (which is between location A and location X) can seek a ride to go to a location X or beyond say location Z. This is the flexibility that the share provides.

This flexibility is what is the cause of safety. 

Once the first passenger is onboard, the driver focuses less on the road and more on his mobile device to pick up his second (possible) passenger, while the Ola machine (algorithm) figures out a possible passenger, the diver has to "accept the second passenger" by clicking on his mobile device. He has to decide if it makes sense to pick the second passenger, he has to figure out if he has to take any detour to pick the passenger etc. High on cognitive load + his need to accept the passenger by clicking a button makes him drive with lesser concentration. This makes the drive unsafe.

Possibly one way to make it a little (just a little) safe is to enable the driver to speak /Yes/ or /No/ to accept the second passenger.