Hidden Charges

This time its regarding two hardworking guys at yet another Railway station. After my previous encounter with the strict rules of the Indian Railways, I found myself at the doors of yet another parcel booking office with my cousin this time. You may consider me unusually brave or a cheat in choosing the Indian Railways to send my cousin’s bike after my first experience with them. But there are times when your hands are tied.

This time we met two guys who promised to help us. They were wearing khaki and looked like permanent staff rather than porters whom I encountered last time. One was tall and lean and the other was fat and resembled a 12 foot grisly bear. They seemed to be the only people around, even passengers were scarce in that railway station. This gave me the impression that we were in for yet another bad experience. These guys were exceptionally quick in instructing us what to do, the quickness you would see in a hungry hyena which has cornered its prey.

This time there was no officer putting his foot down and demanding that the bike should not start once kicked.( I considered ourselves lucky thinking of the last experience with emptying the tank). These guys only wanted to empty the tank and were not interested in making us do the circus acts of going around the station to prove that there was no petrol in the tank. The tall one seemed to be the boss around and he was ordering what to do , the fatso was just following orders like an obedient subordinate.

These guys were quicker in their work but one problem was that , being the only workers around they were a kind of general managers for the station. They left us with our bike and jumped aboard an engine that had arrived and came back only after one hour leaving the station seemingly in our control, they were the ones taking care of the parcels to be sent by train, they were the ones to give signals to trains that passed , they were the ones giving out info about trains and their timings to passengers , they were instructing the sweepers what to do. Thus they proved to be very efficient workers only that they were not much efficient in dealing with human beings , may be their prolonged association with engines and parcels have rendered them with same attitude towards human beings and things that were not supposed to be human beings. Their efficiency portrayal doesn’t end here, they seemed to be the best managers as they were getting work done through other people , even their boss, a feeble fellow with jittery hands and cigarette on his lips( he was the station master , I suppose). This bossy doesn’t seem to know the procedure for filling up the form for the parcel and it was again our guys who came to the rescue of bossy.

This is how they got the bike-packing thing done by me and my poor cousin-. We were sent shopping to near by shops in search of the rope, permanent marker and Aluminium plate to be used in decorating the bike during packing. The moment me and my cousin started explaining to the store owner about our requirements, he swiftly took all the things and kept in front of us and told us “Rs 15 for rope, Rs 20 for Aluminium plate, Rs 15 for permanent marker, as if he has been serving customers like us for over years, We understood that hyenas have been hunting for quite some time now. After we came back after our shopping sojourn they made us wait till their lunch was over. We were kept standing guard for our bike as well as all the parcels that were subjected to these guys’ association. At the end when all the packing was done and our bike was ready for the trip they gave their best shot on us for the day- "We usually keep the petrol because the bottle you used in emptying the tank is ours”. Me and my cousin were intrigued by their shrewdness which made them owners of about less than half a litre of petrol only because thy owned a half litre cola bottle left by some passenger.

I am not telling you the amount they grabbed from us for the packing service,as you may faint. I am not sure whether Lallu ji mentioned efficient workers like these when he gave the much talked about lecture to students who were interested to learn how Indian Railways was lifted from the red. Any way me and my cousin sure would have had a very valid point about “efficiency of workers” if we were to participate in the GD (“ How Indian railways became profitable” ). So this is the story how an organizations success depends on the work of motivated employees like these two that we encountered.

The take away

“Customer is the king”
.
.
.
.
.
.
Not when there are hidden charges!!!!!!