"Endhaa? Browsing centre o?", he asked.
"Haan... Internet centre", I replied, exhausted from the heat of the Kerala Sun and the tar roads.
"Endhaa?" he asked again.
By then, I had struggled enough with this gentleman to move away mumbling a 'Thank you'. Thank you for nothing, I should perhaps have said.
I was on the roads of Trivandrum, having arrived there for a family function. I needed to take a print out of my return ticket for that night, and needed a browsing center for that. By then, I had strayed a good kilometer from the hotel I was staying at. Still, no browsing center was in sight. All I saw were some ancient buildings and some foreigners, and of course lots of Keralites.
After walking some more distance, I chanced upon a hotel on my side. There was a waiter in sight, and I was bored walking sans a destination. So I approached him, and asked in my broken malayalam, "Chaettaa... Ivvada computer center evvada undu?". He eyed me strangely, and said "Angae counter la kaelunga sir, avaruku therinjurukum". Turns out it was a branch of Coimbatore's famous Annapoorna, and the employees there were mostly Tamil people. I learnt from them that there was a browsing center just opposite to the hotel, that I had somehow missed to see (I wish I had missed it forever, but that's another story... well, actually, that's the story that follows).
I entered the "browsing center", and it reminded me of the 'Infotech' xerox and printout center near my college, being crowded with machines and people simultaneously. I told them I needed to do 'browsing', and a guy who was probably 19 years old directed me to a set of cabins. The cabins looked a little like the ones in Sify iWay, and I was somewhat impressed. Little did I know what was about to come.
I sat down in front of the computer, which had a tiny monitor (do they make monitors less than 14 inches? This much be one of them), and a keyboard that was on an immovable platform raised to an awkward height. Well ok, I thought, this is an average Indian browsing center, don't keep your expectations too high. Thinking thusly, I looked at the desktop which was filled with various icons of different programs and files. People put all sorts of files carelessly on public computers' desktops - there was the entire passport application document of a guy on this one's desktop. I could probably have disabled his mobile number using this information, and perhaps could even have gained access to his bank account using some 'Forgot password' option!
Neglecting such allures, I opened the Start menu to open the browser. No sight of Mozilla Firefox, but I was glad to see a Google Chrome icon. Just then, I also happened to see a sign on the wall that said 'To open G-mail, use Google Chrome'. These people seem pretty knowledgeable, I thought. Eagerly, I opened Chrome, and typed gmail <Ctrl-Enter>, which Chrome dutifully converted to www.gmail.com. The mouse pointer got a hour-glass attached to it for a moment, and then... nothing! The page remained blank as it was, and there was no sign of progress.
Umm... Okay. Maybe the Chrome has its network settings wrong or something. Let me try the good old Internet Explorer. Well, old it was - the IE version there was 6.0; the version well known for its horrible security issues, and well known for its inability to handle any decent amount of Ajax that runs many popular websites. Ok, whatever works, let me try to open Google here. Uh oh... "The page cannot be displayed" declared IE (Ah, nostalgia! It feels like years since I last saw that message). Ok, Commander, we have a problem at hand. At the same time, the person in the cabin near mine called the browsing center person, and said something that I understood to mean the "Internet connection is gone". The center guy shot a questioning look at me. Lacking the Malayalam vocabulary needed to explain the situation, I replied "The page cannot be displayed"! He made a poor attempt at hiding his smile, and ventured onto his computer, which I took to be a sign he was trying to repair things. After a few minutes, he called out "Network connectivity repaired". I refreshed the IE screen, and voila! There it was, the revered Google home page.
Immediately, I switched to the Chrome screen, and requested it to try and refresh the page. And then I saw... nothing again! The page remained blank as ever, perhaps reminding me of the virtues of a clean mind. But right then, I needed my ticket more than any advice, so I turned to IE itself. I felt unclean as I opened Gmail using IE6, knowing I might be adding credibility to someone's claim that "Google shouldn't drop support for IE6, there is still a significant percentage of users using it". Coding to work around the various flaws and security bugs in IE6 is a nightmare, and the developer in me cringed at the thought that I might be extending this nightmare to some other developers at Google. But alas, I was only a victim of circumstances, trapped there with nothing but this vicious tool called IE6.
Gmail opened fairly quickly and worked quite okayish even in this browser of the ancients; Kudos the tireless efforts of Googlers. The scroll on the screen was much less than ideal - most of the time I did not know where a scroll of the mouse's wheel was going to take me. Fortunately, I had enabled keyboard shortcuts on Gmail, which made things much more tolerable. I opened the email containing my ticket details, copied the mail and pasted it in Word. A mess of incomprehensible junk got pasted into the document. Phew. I was tired of fighting against fate by this time. Oh Lord, show me some mercy, deliver me a better browser. I made the same request to the 19-year old guy at the center, telling him "Chrome work cheyya laedhu". I know, I know, that's not Malayalam, that's Telugu (hopefully). By this time, I didn't care what language I was talking in, or what he thought of me. I wanted my damn printout.
He caught hold of the mouse (not in Sabari's sense, thankfully), and refreshed the page in Chrome a few times. Giving up on that effort, he started looking for Mozilla Firefox in the Start menu. Finding nothing there, he looked at the desktop, probably hoping against hopes to find it there. Of course, it wasn't there too, so he finally declared that there was a problem with Chrome, and Firefox wasn't available. Well, thank you for the flash news, you prophet! I asked him "Any other systems have Firefox?". He looked at me, and managed to communicate through his glare: "Won't you give up on this already? I have real work to do!". With that, he made some pretenses of looking for Firefox in a few other systems, and left the room in some time, to return only at the climax (I'll cut him some slack though, he was the 'hero' who saved my day finally).
I was now stuck alone with this monster called IE6, and had to grab my dear ticket in its full beauty from this monster's clutch. After some more (failed) attempts at copying and pasting, I admitted defeat. I was never gonna get the mail in a beautiful document, let me at least try to print this mail as it is. The problem was, a friend had booked the ticket for me, and I didn't want her name glaring at the top of the page. I thought, let me forward this mail to myself removing the headers and changing the subject. Then, Gmail will treat it as a separate mail, and only my name would be at the top of the page, which is fine. As I clicked Forward, Gmail put the text of the mail in the 'Compose' text field, which gave me an idea. As a final try, I copied the mail content from this area, and pasted to Word. And... it worked! Hurray! Yay!
Ok, you'd think this would be the end of my sad story. Unfortunately not. But I would spare you the gory details (I'm tired too, to be honest). In summary, the old man who was the 'head' of the browsing center didn't know damn about his own center's printers, and kept giving wrong settings. Every time, we'd walk back and forth between the system and the printer, and every time he would declare "Printout vandhittillaa". Finally, he called for the 19-year old hero, who set things up properly, giving me my beloved ticket - Mario had finally caught hold of his princess.
And that, my friends, is the story of my encounter with the world's worst browsing center!
After all this suffering, I was ready to forgive the sinners and walk out peacefully. But when the old man entered the time I browsed as "40 minutes", I could not contain myself. "Endhaa chaettaa 40 minutes? Half the time net connection work cheydhittillaa, half the time printer work cheydhittillaa! 15 minutes ae nyaan browse cheydhu!!" I exclaimed (now, those who know Malayalam, stop laughing. Now! ). He looked up, gave me a silent glare, and continued writing something. I knew any more resistance was futile, especially given my poor vocabulary, so I thought of a way to communicate my anger in a different way. I needed to sign out of my Gmail account, and went back to the computer. Once I was there, I knew what I had to do. I thought of a trick using PrintScreen, but even that simple key did not work on this system. Not a guy to be discouraged, I first hid all the icons on the Desktop. I then opened the 'Magnifier' application, and dragged it to occupy half of the screen. Now part of the lower half of the screen was shown magnified in the upper half of the screen. But I also wanted to expose the sad plight of Chrome on that system, so I opened it in the lower half of the screen. This would be enough to confuse any averagely-computer-literate guy, I thought.
There were a couple more tricks I could have pulled off, like deleting the IE icons from the start menu and stuff, but I was not sufficiently motivated, and am not sufficiently evil, to do those. This was enough to convey my frustration, to perhaps make them think something is wrong with the center, to perhaps encourage them to make things better. I know, probably building castles in the air, but a man can only hope and dream.
Finally, I walked off carrying my bag, smiling with the satisfaction that I had done my share of Good for the day.
