Our first visit today was to the ICICI bank in Koramangala to make a demand draft to pay my road tax. The draft did get made, but the tax did not get paid, because our agent was out of town. So, once again, this has been postponed to next week

After a good amount of searching, we finally found the telephone exchange in Koramangala. We picked up the wireless DSL modem and set it up ourselves (not that there is much of setting up to do).

However, we weren’t able to test it until almost two hours later because of the really irritating load shedding we have in Bangalore. Lunch was a simple biryani from “Biryani @ Koramangala”, on which we stuffed ourselves.

We’ve been facing a really irritating problem with the internet, as the connection tends to drop at regular intervals. A restart of the modem fixes it, so I have a feeling the modem isn’t able to take the load of two connections downloading data continuously. We intend to complain on Monday, so lets see how it goes.

This is definitely a great improvement over my GPRS connection that I have been using for so many months.

I may need to work tomorrow, but that I shall come to know in a while. I intend to get some coding done today. My plugins would do well with updates.

Does any of these sound familiar? “So-and-so bank offers you a free lifetime credit card” or “Would you like a personal loan of …” or “You have been selected for a special vacation.”

Almost all of us have been disturbed by the shrill ringing of our telephone only to realize that the important call we’ve been expecting is in fact the call of an overly zealous telemarketer just trying to do his/her job at the cost of our irritation.

Here in India it is terrible, and I understand it is even worse in the USA. Even the Do Not Call registry is unable to successfully stop every single call.

Enter TelemarketerCatcher.com. Launced in 2008 Telemarketer Catcher is a public forum for people to share information about telemarketers. Telemarketer Catcher claims to have the largest list of known or suspected telemarketers, and that users are constantly adding new suspected marketers to the list.

You can use the site to look up a number and determine whether it’s a marketer, or more importantly to publish your own complaint as a warning to others.

I haven’t been able to test the effectiveness of this service, simply because I’m not from the US. Hence, I would love to hear feedback from readers from that region on how effective this actually is in catching telemarketers.

Were you able to find and stop any? How accurate is the database? Have you reported any telemarketers?

Read aloud for best results. “Tendjewberrymud” Be warned, you’re going to find yourself talking “funny” for a while after reading this.

The following is a telephone exchange between a hotel guest and room-service at a hotel in Asia, which was recorded and published in the FarEast Economic Review…

Room Service (RS): “Morny. Ruin sorbees”
Guest (G): “Sorry, I thought I dialled room-service”
RS: “Rye.. Ruin sorbees.. morny! Djewish to odor sunteen??”
G: “Uh.. yes.. I’d like some bacon and eggs”
RS: “Ow July den?”
G: “What??”
RS: “Ow July den?… pry, boy, pooch?
G : “Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry, scrambled please.”
RS: “Ow July dee bayhcem… crease?”
G: “Crisp will be fine.”
RS : “Hokay. An San tos?”
G: “What?”
RS: “San tos. July San tos?”
G: “I don’t think so”
RS: “No? Judo one toes??”
G: “I feel really bad about this, but I don’t know what ‘judo one
toes’ means.”
RS: “Toes! toes!… why djew Don Juan toes? Ow bow singlish mopping
we bother?”
G: “English muffin!! I’ve got it! You were saying ‘Toast.’ Fine.
Yes, an English muffin will be fine.”
RS: “We bother?”
G: “No.. just put the bother on the side.”
RS: “Wad?”
G: “I mean butter… just put it on the side.”
RS: “Copy?”
G: “Sorry?”
RS: “Copy… tea… mill?”
G: “Yes. Coffee please, and that’s all.”
RS: “One Minnie. Ass ruin torino fee, strangle ache, crease baychem,
tossy singlish mopping we bother honey sigh, and copy…. rye??”
G: “Whatever you say”
RS: “Tendjewberrymud”
G : “You’re welcome.”