A side-effect of owning a broadband connection from BSNL is how quickly you become adept at “The Art of Negotiation,” particularly true if
Your phone is a fair distance away from your ADSL modem and
Your family lives with you and competes for usage of the phone (both incoming and outgoing)
Picture this.
You are cruising the Internet at 256Kbps (bandwidth may vary in your case), you find something, a few hundred megabytes in size, that you MUST download, you are halfway through the download, and then the phone rings. Ring…Ring… You think “Hah! I can use both my phone and simultaneously download that must have multi-megabyte file because I now have ADSL.” Someone at home picks up the phone and says “Hello.” Voila! There’s no longer any Internet connection. So much for your arrogance at owning ADSL.
Once the above incident becomes a part of your daily routine you start to become adept at “The Art of Negotiation”. You suddenly find yourself doing favors, both big and small, to your family members. You find yourself cooing sweet nothings. In a short time you become the darling in the house. All this for the single hope that you can influence their decision to use the phone when you are using the Internet.
Here’s another bizarre incident. At a friend’s house, the broadband activity lights go kaput when he switches on the fan! I’ve seen this happen in front of my eyes. My friend says that his broadband experience has now turned into a “nudeband experience”. The summer’s turned worse in Bangalore and the poor fellow can’t turn on the fan!
Lured by the recent advertisement from BSNL that offers free broadband for two months? Just make sure your computer’s a very close neighbor to the phone socket (the one that comes into your home from the pole outside). If that’s a no go, you could always enroll for tuition in my classes on “BSNL Broadband and The Art of Negotiation”.
