3 Months after a new Service!

So NMMT is very proud of their Volvo Service! There are many who travel regularly in the bus too. I have seen about 8 – 10 buses in the depot at night. The buses are maintained very well, the service folks wash the bus every night and make sure that the buses are neat and clean.

There are many who are curious about the service and search a lot, no wonder my first post about NMMT Volvo has had 440 hits & Wait Wait & Wait… But you may never find your NMMT! has had 44 visits, that is 484 visits to my blogs out of the 1, 111 till date (29th Sept 09). Which is 43.56%.

NMMT has indeed delivered a mode of transport that was never seen on the public roads of Mumbai but does merely delivering a mode of transport suffice the purpose? Isn’t management of the service an ongoing basis a very significant part of the deliverable? And most importantly… Isn’t maintaining the existing lot of non Volvo buses of the fleet an equally important job?

Here are some points to ponder.

1. Shouldn’t there be a supervisor who maintains a queue at Bandra? There is always a mad rush of people to get into the bus, people are supposed to maintain a Queue which is quite absent in our culture. I don’t blame everyone because if there are only a handful of people who believe in queues and a hell lot of mad ones don’t give a damn about queues, the former ones are gonna be at disadvantage.

I don’t know how it works out in Belapur. If you could throw some light via comments, it would definitely be helpful to other readers.

BEST beats NMMT here as they have the advantage of the depot and a queue system.

2. Shouldn’t the frequency be more smarter? The buses are supposed to leave every 20 mins from Bandra but this is pretty stupid at rush hours, thanks to the heavy traffic at Bandra, Sion, Chembur and other unexpected locations, you may find yourself waiting for the bus for over 45 mins at Bandra.

505s are more in number and pretty frequent too.

3. What about regular NMMTs? I am sure that lesser lucky commuters (like me ) to Navi Mumbai who have to take a regular NMMT eventually to reach their homes have to get into a rickety ill maintained bus. Isn’t maintaining the rest of the fleet like the Volvos necessary?

And as I have heard from conductors of NMMT, the supervisors don’t treat them well and the don’t heed to the repeated requests of drivers and conductors for better maintenance of buses. Many of us know how the roofs of the buses leaks during the monsoon and how frequently the buses breaks down. Not to mention how the drivers “follow” the “rule” of not allowing people to get in from the front and how they simply choose to ignore most of the traffic rules!

I am neither supporting or opposing any transport body, I am just a regular commuter who tries to reach his destination in the easiest & comfortably available mode of transport. Yeah, I do look for customer service but I do realize that I can’t expect to be treated like a king everywhere

By the way, next time you have issues with an ill maintained bus or a misbehaving driver or conductor or if you need any assistance about the NMMT service, here is the number of the Thurbe Depot- 022-2784 6724. I have observed many people searching for the bus schedule and the route, the above number can help you with it.

Novin

Pain Central

Yesterday Dipsikha, Prikanku (Golu), Shiju and me landed up at Central at Raghuleela Mall in Vashi to buy Golu a wallet. Since we had a about 1 hour till 6 PM to kill before watching “What’s your Raashee?” we shopped at ease, we browsed through lots of wallet and finally decided on one. I shopped for a few accessories. Finally after about 20 mins we were at the billing counter. Guess what…. Only two execs to bill the entire lot of customers. The lady who was at the counter where I was standing had swiped a guy’s ( a gentleman in his late 40′s, he had come with his wife) card about 10 times and was still not able to make the card read. Probably the card was bad but she took her sweet time to scan the entire lot of cloths the guy had in his hands!

I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, so I moved to the other queue where two guys had already handed over their stuff to the exec at the counter and our exec was opening every pack of whatever was being billed and checking it! Phew! That was the height of it.

We “strategically” decided that Dipsikha will stand in one Queue and Golu n Me in the other… Our strategy was no good since making the billing guys work faster wasn’t in our hands. I finally decided that I am gonna keep my accessories (3 briefs ) back to the rack and exit out of there. Oh forgot to mention that when the lady at billing was sorting out the bill she was also trying to push him to shop for a few more bucks so that he was eligible for an offer which could make him win a dinner set and some other shit that was displayed in front of the billing counter. Damn it! I went and placed my undies back in the rack.

Golu who was still hopeful that his turn will arrive shortly was still in the queue. There was this lady behind Golu who was assisted by a Central sales guy for billing her Trolley Bag, the sales guy passed on his receipt the moment the cust in front of Golu had paid up.

Thats it! Ridiculous staff and service that sucks… It all takes one moment to tarnish the picture that you had painted for yourself over the years. We decided not to buy anything more and wanted to talk to the Manager but he was at the other floor and we had better things to do. Damn it! I am sure Future Group wouldn’t want do business this way.

Rainy Day

Ah! The title is damn generic but today has been a very rainy day here in Mumbai. It was the last day of “Ganpati Visarjan“. Right now its 00:05 hrs on 4th Sept but its been raining since 9:30 tonight. It poured heavily this morning too…

Good to see the continuous rains after many days, I bet it hasn’t rained this consistantly since the onset of monsoon!

Mine and my room-mates wildest imagination wants it to rain so heavily throughout the night that everything comes to a stand still tomorrow there is no way we would be able to go to work! I bet most of us would! The moment the FM channels cry about high tide or heavy rains people stop coming to work! Nice excuse, thanks to the 26th July 2006 back when Mumbai witnessed some of the worst floods of its recent times.

As I was writing the imagination part the rains had subsided for a while but it has gained momentum once again and its cats & dogs now!

Signing Off!

Novin