Innovation that doesn’t serve the purpose is like and over sized underwear; You have no other go but to wear it and you know you are comfortable without it.
Thats all that i have to say about the automated kiosks that have been installed by the city authorities of bangalore. Yes! its the Silicon Valley of India, where police check traffic violations using PDAs and common people no longer burns ordinary BMTC buses, but target Volvo buses. Apparently thats how they fight globalization.
Last night i went to the kiosk near my home to pay the water bill. Well if it was long queue in front of a ‘human operated pigeon hole kiosk’, i would have reached home earlier. It took me 10 min to make it accept each of the ten 100 bills that i had. Apparently it has an aversion towards money and even if its kind enough to accept the money, it would rather prefer an old bill than a new one.
If u may argue that the human factor is avoided and automation lets it run 24hrs. Hold on, i say! Apparently the then Hutch now Vodafone, introduced the same for billing systems. People were strugling to get the money in. So guess what they did? They posted a guy at that location, 2 guys in fact one for the morning and one for the night shift. At the end of the day, they end up paying 2 guys instead of one.
The only good thing about it is that if you want to make payment by cheque or with a credit card its faster. That means if u dont have a credit card, stay in the line for hours just to pay.
The fact is true that you can pay any time of the day, 7 days a week. But they just forgot the usability factor in that. Another loose underwear!!! The technology was supposed to kick ass, but it now kicks you balls and it hurts real bad.
