Airtel Customer Service

I have been using Airtel from the day I got my own cell phone. That should be 5 years now, I guess. Yeah.
Though I have always appreciated their service in NCR, which is the reason i still stick to them. You know at the end of day, all you need is a decent strength of those waves so that you can make and take calls anywhere and anytime. Nevertheless, Airtel's customer service still sucks big time. I remember the first SIM I got was with my cell phone. There was an offer at that time, where you used to get a free connection for purchasing Nokia cell phones. Anyways, the story goes like this. After I got the SIM activated, I realized that no one from a landline phone was able to call me! Strange and f***ing irritating. What was the point of me having the cell, when not even my mother can call me from our landline! I dialed 121 and they told me that there must be some problem with my cell! WTF, tell that to someone who is pulling a rickshaw and he may be fooled by this shit response! I on the other hand being a technology follower and obviously a Computer Science student was not willing to be tricked by such comments. I told the guy that it's impossible that something like that can happen due to my device. May be that guy was not having his manual something like this. So, I will not blame him or mince bad words to him. Instead, I have sympathy to him as how he must be thinking that I might be cursing him as soon as I disconnected the call :D. So anyways, even after 3 more calls with different executives my problem remain unsolved and mom still had to call on Nitin's cell :( I got a new number. Again Airtel. I remember the reason behind deciding for Airtel again. Nitin was the first one of us to get a cell and he was having an Idea connection. Idea had some problems with the network in those days at times, when we were in LT or hostel, sometimes the signal will just die! So I went again for Airtel.
Time and again I had to call customer support 2-3 times for different reasons. i don't remember any such instance which can be such gross! But yes, I was always cribbing about their customer service due to one or another reason.

Last year, when I was in States, I forgot paying bill for one month and those freaks deactivated my cell :( I wrote many mails and asked for clarifications about why this was done, when my pending amount was far less than 1200 (which was set for my account). The height of all this was that they were expecting me to pay the pending bill which was somewhere near 300 and they had already deactivated my number for no good. i penned down a long mail to the nodal office asking me how and why about this and letting him know that I am not at all going to pay up the pending amount unless my number is activated again. I even warned him that i might see customer court in this regard :P That guy wrote back to me saying that it's no possible for him to re-activate the number but I need not pay the pending amount :D. At least, I got the due cleared off my shelf.

this year, back in Feb, when I reached India, i again got Airtel. Last month, I called 121 and asked them to activate international roaming on my cell to which the lady on the other side replied that I need to shell out 6K as security deposit! I told her politely that I am having corporate connection and I am damn sure that I need not pay any security as last year also, I had paid nothing for activation. But she insisted that I will have to pay up, other wise no international roaming for me. Go to Hell is what I mumbled in my mind and thanked her for her generosity :) I sat down and typed a mail to 121 asking to activate international roaming on my cell. The very next day, I got reply that this has been activated on my cell, no security deposits asked! I was like, dude why can't the people on phone know this! Are there different manuals for people who are attending calls and those who are responding to mails? If that is the case then of course it sucks!

Till this day customer service is not Airtel's forte!