My first sms breakup

Delhi Tracks

32 Posts
454 Comments

It is no shock that Mobile phone usage in India is mindblowing. It seems that everyone has a Mobile Phone – from the driver, to the maids, to the autorickshaw drivers to the small roadside street vendors. With 40 – 50% mobile phone penetration overall , or 400M – 500M or so users, so in the metros it seems to be all about mobiles. To put the number in prespective, India has overtaken the US in absolute terms of users, ranking it #2 in the world next to China.

So with all these mobile phones around – SMS is also a big phenomena. I will come back to all the junk SMS that I recieve on a daily basis – but generally speaking the educated class is quite familiar with SMS and uses it quite frequently as a means of keeping in touch. And for those that cannot read/write and also for the rest of us that are too lazy to type – there is also voice SMS. Voice SMS is just like leaving a message – but really much better – you don’t have to hope that the other person will NOT pick up. And I ofcourse got an junk marketing SMS only two -three days ago from AIRTEL ( my mobile carrier) – that I too can send voice SMS for only 75 paise/SMS ( about a 1.5 cents) by just putting * before the number. It is really quite simple.

So when my designer decided one fine day to just quit on me – there was no phone call – just an SMS saying that she is sorry that she will not be able to finish the job since her workers have already left for Diwali and that she is really tied up with other jobs. Just like that with an SMS – she decided to quit on me. No phone call or anything. Since most of the stuff works on word of mouth – there are really no contracts or anything like that. YOU work on a trust based system. Since, we were both referred to each other through a common friend – there was no question of not trusting the other person to deliver. But I guess I was dead wrong. But I guess what bothered me the most – that she did not call to discuss with me what are the options – NOTHING. Just an SMS out of nowhere. The unprofessionalism of the whole thing. AND not to mention that the entire process has set me back by more than one month.