Today I met Petra & Jürgen, two good friends who had lived in Bangalore till 2004 and we remembered a hilarious story which is truly a T.I.I. – clearly on the sympathetic side: I used to order pizzas in Bangalore from Domino Pizza which always got delivered tasty, crispy, hot and fresh. Somehow, the first time when I placed the order I spelled my last name several times
“S – E – I – F – E – R – T”
The person on the other side entered something into the IT-based customer- & order system, the pizza arrived, all well. The next time called for an order, I got greeted with the standard “Good evening, here is Domino Pizza, for taking your order may I request your phone number.” As for all these home delivery services the phone number is the unambiguous identifier (“primary key”) for the customer. I told him my number, he typed it into the system and asked back after what had prompted on his screen: “Are you Mr. Eife”? As a good German I would have had to correct him, ask him to change the name into the correct one, and if he doesn’t get it let him know that “verdammt noch mal, jetzt merken Sie es sich gefälligst!!” (too German to translate)
Yet, being in South India, knowing that it would just do nothing if I ask him to make that change, knowing that I would just get a virtual head-swing with “ya, ya, ya” and zero action to my request, and even worse create confusion and drastically increasing the risk to go to bed hungry that night, I succumbed to my destiny and replied to his question if I was “Mr. Eife” – “Yes, that’s right”. And frankly, I found so much of a likening of this name that whenever I called Domino Pizza I would say myself: “Good evening, my name is Eife and I would like to order a Pizza …”
Feeds
Haha, der Mr. Eife. Immer wenn wir selbst Pizza bei Domino´s bestellt haben, hat sich Jürgen an den Mr. Eife erinnert :-)
(Übrigens sind wir erst 2005 nach München zurück.)
Servus Eife,
I had a similar experience when I was working in Singapore for a couple of months where I used to call a cab late at night from my office to get back to the hotel. The otherwise highly reliable taxi company (of course - it’s Singapore after all) also used my office phone number as identifier and after a couple of tedious attempts of spelling my name I optimized the whole procedure by switching to “Mr. Li” - which worked perfectly well.
From thereon, “Mr. Li” also became my name of choice in China and India.
Cheers,
Christian