The “Web” of life….
The “Web” of life….
Sitting in the Tirumayilai railway ticket reservation queue, I went through a quick retrospection to realize how much things have improved. My earliest recollections of booking a railway ticket dates back to more than ten years back…There used to be only one railway ticket booking center for the entire city, near Central station, Chennai. Booking a few tickets for a short trip during vacation was such a Herculean task. I remember going to the booking center as a group of 4-5 people so that each one of us could stand in one of the queues. We used to keep shifting between the queues and spent most of the time wondering, which one moved faster! In compliance with Murphy’s Law, the queue that we left always started moving faster!! After hours of waiting, when one of us reached the counter, it would invariably be closed for a lunch break! Or there wouldn’t be any tickets available to the desired destination!
I was brought to back from my retrospection, when the man sitting next to me tapped my seat and asked me to move with the queue…he must have been around 60 years of age and was particularly worried about losing his chance to book his ticket. Since I was sitting in the “Ladies and Senior citizens”, I was pretty much surrounded by people similar to this neighbor of mine. He was blissfully unaware of the various facilities with which people were able to choose the right train for their journeys. Apparently, he had filled a bunch of application forms for each of the possible trains he could take to reach his destination, based on the availability! I could not help thinking that we have come a long way from what we were ten years back, in terms of technological advancement. Today, we are able to find the status of ticket availability right before we reach the booking counter either through a website or through a (hard) touch-screen device! For lazier and busier people who cannot spare the time to go and wait in the ticket counter, online booking comes as an easy solution.
Knowingly or unknowingly, the internet has invaded our lives to a great extent. Today, I feel really lazy to search the telephone directory book to find a telephone number. The advancement of the internet and the ubiquitous Google search engine have become so much a part of our daily lives, that we have started taking too many things for granted. We no longer rely on human memory to do several things which would have taken a lot out of us, perhaps a decade ago. Today, it’s easier (and cheaper!) to read a newspaper online. In this world that is racing against time, it’s more convenient to pay a bill online and also set a reminder to be prompted to pay it!
All that said, I am still saddened (rather annoyed) by the tardiness and lack of a customer friendly person at the ticket counter.
No matter how great and efficient our computer systems are, the marvels of the human brain which designed it all, is still undoubtedly greater!
Sitting in the Tirumayilai railway ticket reservation queue, I went through a quick retrospection to realize how much things have improved. My earliest recollections of booking a railway ticket dates back to more than ten years back…There used to be only one railway ticket booking center for the entire city, near Central station, Chennai. Booking a few tickets for a short trip during vacation was such a Herculean task. I remember going to the booking center as a group of 4-5 people so that each one of us could stand in one of the queues. We used to keep shifting between the queues and spent most of the time wondering, which one moved faster! In compliance with Murphy’s Law, the queue that we left always started moving faster!! After hours of waiting, when one of us reached the counter, it would invariably be closed for a lunch break! Or there wouldn’t be any tickets available to the desired destination!
I was brought to back from my retrospection, when the man sitting next to me tapped my seat and asked me to move with the queue…he must have been around 60 years of age and was particularly worried about losing his chance to book his ticket. Since I was sitting in the “Ladies and Senior citizens”, I was pretty much surrounded by people similar to this neighbor of mine. He was blissfully unaware of the various facilities with which people were able to choose the right train for their journeys. Apparently, he had filled a bunch of application forms for each of the possible trains he could take to reach his destination, based on the availability! I could not help thinking that we have come a long way from what we were ten years back, in terms of technological advancement. Today, we are able to find the status of ticket availability right before we reach the booking counter either through a website or through a (hard) touch-screen device! For lazier and busier people who cannot spare the time to go and wait in the ticket counter, online booking comes as an easy solution.
Knowingly or unknowingly, the internet has invaded our lives to a great extent. Today, I feel really lazy to search the telephone directory book to find a telephone number. The advancement of the internet and the ubiquitous Google search engine have become so much a part of our daily lives, that we have started taking too many things for granted. We no longer rely on human memory to do several things which would have taken a lot out of us, perhaps a decade ago. Today, it’s easier (and cheaper!) to read a newspaper online. In this world that is racing against time, it’s more convenient to pay a bill online and also set a reminder to be prompted to pay it!
All that said, I am still saddened (rather annoyed) by the tardiness and lack of a customer friendly person at the ticket counter.
No matter how great and efficient our computer systems are, the marvels of the human brain which designed it all, is still undoubtedly greater!
posted by Nithya @ 2:56 AM
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