Crowd sourcing vs customer care

Just when I ran out of ideas to blog about, God gave me one. No sorry, my tablet gave me one.

See, I convinced every one and myself that I need a tablet to test my apps and bought a - cheap one. Nothing new in that, I repent each time and each time I buy a low cost, low quality device.

This is a micromax tablet - the feature which caught my eyes was the salesman's willingness to pay 2000 Rs. instead of 1500 for my old tablet. Ha! So it is lollipop, has dual camera and dual sim and is INDIAN. I need to be pro-national, right!

I repented the purchase immeditely. The first touch theme or some thing was showing very large icons which were not even pretty. But then after some tinkering I started using it - for playing games and once in while browsing.

But yesterday it died. Or the battery died. And today morning when I was charging, I pressed the power button and lo, it got chinkified.

It started some blue menu with some lines in a language I could not decipher. I think the characters were chinese. I know a thing or two about hard resetting of devices. So I used volume buttons to scroll, hoping that some where I find an option to reboot the device - in English. I could not. I tried some options and then gave up.

So I googled Micromax helpline and called them. The customer service executive was very helpful - was trying to be helpful. But obviously he did not have a clue for this dragonification of my tablet. He suggested I take it to service center where they will flash the OS again. And gave me the locations of service centers in Bangalore.

I decided this will be one work for me and my spouse on this weekend. But just out of curiosity googled about chinese characters in Micromax tablet. First suggestion - ifixit site told me to scroll to the end of the screen and select it. And the system would reboot.

It did. The tablet  booted normally as if nothing had gone wrong.

Image from https://www.ifixit.com/

So now I can continue to use the tablet (for playing games :) )

My suggestion to customer care executives - Please when someone calls you with a problem, put them on hold and google the problem, and you will get plenty of  solutions. Direct the person  to solve the problem by reading out google suggestion. People will bless you.