Posts tagged Bad-experience
Bangalore KempKids – Be careful of the dogs
May 1st
My brother visited me last weekend. On saturday, I took them to Kemp Kids (a.k.a Kempfort) in Airport road. Kempkids is actually a good-enough place to kill a couple of hours, but personally I would leave my wallet in home before going there. They quote exorbitant prices for everything! They have these furry animals (a golden bear-like dog, a spotted dog, a “king-kong” rabbit) at the entrance, amusing kids. I am sure if I had been a kid, I’d have loved to shake hands with them myself.
No doubt these characters are a big hit with the children. But, they are equally irritating to the adults. They try to act smart with ladies, especially of the attractive kind. Once I saw the person wearing the small spotted dog costume, hiding behind the front gate and scaring the kids – a good prank, I’d say, but the person was doing this to the ladies (note that, he didn’t try this on any of the males entering Kempkids), that too with an extra josh, freely touching them. Two of the six girls/ladies he scared, gave him a nice scolding before moving on. The others I am sure would have felt the same rage, but probably covered it up behind an embarassing smile.
I am not sure if Kempkids has any rules/guidelines for these cartoon characters, but if they don’t have them in place yet, its high time they did something about this.
Indian shopping sites – Need to improve a lot!
Apr 25th
I wanted to buy this shaver, but Amazon said it wouldnt be possible to ship this to India, due to some export regulation blah blah blah. So, I decided to check the local online malls. I am not new to online shopping in India, but It has been a long time since I visited them, especially Fabmall (now renamed to indiaplaza.in).
The site took sometime to load, but the thing that got my attention was - The interface hasn’t changed at all.  I guess the store name is the only thing that has changed (kinda like selling the same shampoo in a new bottle with the tag “New formula”). The site looked neat, though I personally hate fixed-width layouts. Why can’t they make use of all of my 19″ monitor space? A simple fluid layout would have been nice.
“Cut the crap, do what you came here for”, I thought. Since I couldn’t find something like “Personal care” or “Beauty products” (?!) in the available products section, I decided to do a shop-wide search. The real irritation started!
[Click the image to open it in a new window, enlarged. For convenience sake, I have put a dim filter on the image, except for the areas of interest.]
As you can see from the image, the top bar lists out more product categories than the items in the search drop box. WTH? Doesn’t Indiaplaza know how to search in the other categories? Or probably it wants us to manually go through all the product listing pages to find ours. This made me very curious, I decided to check out the other famous (or atleast, whatever shopping stores I know!) online shopping sites.
Xbox 360 damages discs – Be very careful!
Apr 17th
If you own a Xbox 360 you surely would have come across the famous “Disc not readable” problem. Whenever it happens, you are forced to take out the disc, clean it, sometimes reboot Xbox 360 to get the disc to play again. I was so scared the first time my Gears of War refused to play, even after repeated cleaning/trying…cleaning/trying ritual. I thought I had lost my Rs.2500 spent on that game. Fortunately, a quick Google search assured me I was not alone and it was not a major problem. But, I stumbled upon another serious problem that can happen if you are not careful – Xbox 360 can damage your discs permanently. This was scary! There are some sound advice on what to do and what not to do with a disc inside Xbox360. Though the problem has been root caused, people are still seeing random scratches. I can only attribute this to Xbox360 loving your discs so much it can’t stop itself from caressing them a bit too harsh 
Finally Microsoft has owned up to this and has rolled out a replacement program (Note that MS has its own list of Terms and Conditions). Luckily GoW is covered there 
Check out this video that shows Xbox360 scratching a disc.
Sin-”bad” Adventures!
Apr 29th
This happened last month (March). March 25th was a holiday (Good Friday), so I bought a KSRTC ticket to Chennai, for Thursday night (March 24th), or at least that was what I thought I did! I actually had bought a ticket for Friday night (March 25) and I did not even notice that mistake until I went there to the bus stand!
Thursday evening, I left office by 7pm, went home, packed lotsa clothes (to wash in Chennai), stuffed my camera + other valuables along with my laptop in to a shoulder bag, started merrily to Majestic bus stand! As the next day was Good Friday, KSRTC expected lotsa passengers and had arranged for many special trips to Chennai. So, my 10.15pm bus actually came in only by 11.45pm!! Feeling relieved that I had not missed the bus, I boarded it and was shocked to see another person sitting in my seat, #14.
I told him, “Hey, I have this seat booked”.
“Really?! I also have this. See…here is my ticket”
I compared all the fields, could not find any difference! I was really irritated by then. Who wouldn’t be! I took both the tickets to the driver and told him the problem. He had one look at both the things and said I had got a ticket for the next day!! Only then I noticed it. I sheepishly apologized to that #14 middle-aged man, got off the bus as quickly as possible! I could hear the driver telling me it was possible to transfer the tickets. I didn’t even turn to thank him. Since, it was already nearing 12am, the ticket controller said it was impossible to transfer the tickets. So, I was standing there, with a ticket for the next day’s night, wondering whether to go back to my house in Airport road, or to buy a ticket in some bus and reach Chennai somehow! Unfortunately, I decided on the latter. More >
