Something as mundane as replacing a laptop battery can be quite an adventure in Mumbai
This was in September 2020. Driving through the steady rain was romantic except that innumerable metro-work diversions made getting to Opera House more akin to navigating a maze. I did not anticipate the adventure that I was going to embark upon.
After the mandatory temperature check, I got into Panchratna, Mumbai’s traditional diamond trading hub. Much like the road, the building was labyrinthine. It took a series of confusing lefts and rights before I reached the HP service centre. It was a simple enough task. The battery of my wife’s laptop needed to be replaced.
Depositor of laptops
It was a hospital waiting room-style seating arrangement. A hassled looking middle-aged gentleman pulled out a laptop. ‘Kya problem hain?’ Asked the gruff gentleman behind the desk.
‘Start nahi hota’.
‘Chalo, yeh warranty main hain, chhod ke jaon’.
I almost got up from my uncomfortable perch, but my friend laboriously pulled out and deposited three more laptops in quick succession. Each laptop sullenly looked at and tagged by the technician.
When I finally got my turn, he suddenly turned polite, ‘see you take the laptop home. Fill up a form online and order a battery. We will call you back in a week, when it reaches us. Then we take a couple of more days to replace the battery.’
I wondered aloud,’ Isn’t there an easier way?’.
‘About a km away at Lamington Road, you will find HP World. They should readily have batteries and may be able to replace it immediately’. As I left the service centre, I felt footsteps follow me. It was the same hassled dumper of laptops. Passing on a shiny business card, he said, ‘I have a showroom at Lamington Road. Please contact me should you require any sales and service support’.
The man wasn’t without a sense of misplaced adventure. I glared at him and walked past.
The attempted swindle
Mumbai’s IT hub bore no signs of being in a lockdown. Honking cars, unmasked people having long and intimate conversations, panwallahs doing roaring business…it was just another day.
HP World was a nondescript affair. A tiny ‘showroom’, it had no more than a dozen laptops in display and three shifty-eyed staff. The attendant stood aside after depositing my wet umbrella in a bin. The sales guy approached me with mock seriousness. I asked if he’d have the battery. He examined the laptop and conducted an online search for the part number.
‘I can supply the battery. But it will take a week.’
‘But the service centre said, you can do this sooner and cheaper’.
The brazenness of his response took me aback,’ DISCLAIMER. You are going to be dealing with me and not with HP World. I will get you batteries from the same vendor who supplies to HP. But you will save money since the vendor doesn’t have to pay royalties to HP.’
He quickly asked,’ By the way, how much did the HP Service centre quote?’
When I refused to answer, he said, ‘I can get it done for Rs 8,000 and give you a one-year warranty. The service centre will charge more and give you only a six-month warranty.’
‘Can I not order the battery officially through HP?’.
In very popular sitcom ‘Office-Office’ style, he said, ‘you can talk to the manager.’
An unremarkable lady, she possessed a calm streak of adventure when it came to crookedness.
Notwithstanding the size of the room, the manager pretended to have not heard a word of this insidious sales pitch. The only thing she had to say was, ‘ I don’t know. I can’t help you. Please look up online.’
The saviour
I got out of the hellhole. Across the street was a shop whose name rang a bell. More than a decade ago, I had got a desktop PC assembled at Prime ABGB.
The cheery but practical owner Gulbirr Bhatia had been racing up and down his sprawling shop to help a bunch of teenagers looking for the latest hardware to juice up their gaming machines. But he spotted me quickly in the melee and got his guys to help me. ‘I don’t have an HP battery but a compatible one. Including GST and labour charges, you will need to pay Rs 3,775’.
He wasn’t willing to lower his price by even Rs 100. But promised me that the replacement would be done in two hours. I returned to pick up the laptop in two hours and five minutes. But the shop had called me just as I got off the cab at the stroke of two hours!
‘We did not charge the new battery for too long. Without the login PIN we wouldn’t have known the percentage of charge. Overcharging is the reason why you have needed to replace the battery,’ said Bhatia with a twinkle in his eye.
‘I have been telling her not to do that. But she doesn’t listen’. He held up the puffed-up battery. ‘ Kya Karein?’ Wives don’t listen to us yaar’.
The laptop worked perfectly. But, late evening, we realised that the adventure was still not over.
I had left behind the Bluetooth mouse’s USB receiver. I messaged Bhatia close to midnight. He responded within 10 minutes. ‘I will let you know by 1030 am tomorrow, if I have it.’
At 1023 am, the next day, my phone pinged, ‘ please pick up your USB receiver around noon!’
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