It all started when my sister decided that the two of us together should gift my dad an iPod.. Since i was to buy the pod in Chennai, she gave me a cheque for her share of it (I know she could have done an online transfer but that's not what i wanna discuss here)..
Anyway, i promptly deposited the cheque at SBI when i got back to Chennai.. They said there was going to be some re-structuring at the bank and hence, it will take up to 10 days for the money to get transferred.. I was thinking "Fair enough, at least they warned me".. Ten days became fifteen and then after 21 days, i contacted them again since it still hadn't been transferred..
Now this is where SBI left me stunned.. They said they would check up on it and promptly sent a Telegram.. No, I'm not kidding, they did send a telegram.. In this day and age, when million dollar transactions are done online, our Indian banking system still depends on telegram to get messages across.. You can imagine what the net effect of this is, an additional delay that is added by the Indian Postal service.. Its been a week since the telegram was sent and still no response.. The telegram was sent to Standard Chartered; i wonder if the delay is because Standard Chartered didn't know how to respond to this or if they replied with a telegram of their own!!
On a side note, TCS is the solutions provider for SBI and one of the SBI employees had threatened to beat me up when i told them i had gotten placed in TCS.. I'm not sure though, if its the TCS service or the need to identify with the 'aam aadmi' that is making SBI use what i presume to be an obsolete method of communication..
