Thursday, August 12, 2010

Certified Store Manager, and a fraudulent (it seems) online train traveller

And I am back. Yes, another posting within 24 hours. And I have cleared the certification exam that I wrote this morning. How many exams would have a passing percentage of 70? Well, this one had. And, I got 82%. Yippeee!! I am certified in the concepts of "Store Management" now.

I got a strange mail from IRCTC today. At first, I thought it was a spam mail. But, on second look, it seemed original, but just badly constructed. It mentioned about the TDRs (ticket deposit receipts) that I had filed last year. I had filed 3 of them, because I felt the Indian Railways owed me money. The TDR was approved for one instance for a ticket which I had not used to travel. The second one was filed since the train was late by more than 3 hours. I swear they had a category like that. They rejected this one, for some strange reason. And my reason for filing the third TDR was that they had failed to provide me blankets in a 3rd AC coach. I guess I selected a category of something on the lines of 'Others' for this one. Of course, they rejected this as well. So, eventually I was left with 1 successful and 2 failed TDRs. The emails (2 of them) that I got today was about these 2 failed TDRs. They mentioned the PNR (passenger name record) numbers of these 2 tickets, for which I had raised TDRs. They didnt mention the date of travel. But thankfully, as I had archived all those e-tickets, I was able to find out which date they are talking about.

The key part to these mails was that they informed me that my userid has been disabled because this was a "fraudulent activity". Of course, I replied to them today stating the reasons for which I had raised the TDRs. I hope someday I will get a reply to my email. I guess the odds are instead in favor of me calling their customer "so called" helpdesk sometime within a week.

Oh, by the way, when I try to login to the site, it tells me that my userid is an invalid one. Hmm. I tried going to their page where a new user can register, and they mention that my userid is available to be taken up. Who writes such code?! Of course, since I cant login to their site now, I cannot view my previous tickets or TDRs. Thankfully, as I mentioned earlier, I had archived those e-tickets locally. I wonder what other folks would do in such a circumstance!

My only concern in getting back this userid is to be able to cancel some of the tickets I have booked online. I already had created another user on their site, as they had a rule of only 10 tickets per user per month. So, I still have a way to book new tickets, but if I dont get this userid back, I might not be able to claim cancelled tickets. I still have roughly a month before I need to do so. So, I guess there's plenty of time to get things back to normal. Or, do I? :)

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