Year: 2006

Longer than the Longest Day

March 23, 2006 / London 2005 / 8 Comments

I had declared 30th May 2005 as my longest day. Air India proved me wrong. My longest day was 18 Feb 2006.

I didn’t plan to fly Air India to Chennai in the first place. British Airways had more convenient timings and a similar fare. But I clicked on the wrong button, and didn’t realise until a few days before the flight that I was on the Air India, and that the flight left at 8:45am.

4:30am UK. Wake up. Brush teeth. Bathe. All items packed previous night.
5:10am UK. Taxi arrives and calls. Great timing.
6:05am UK. Arrive at Heathrow Terminal 3. Good timing.
6:10am UK. Huge queue near Emirates counter. Can’t be mine. Walk in.
6:11am UK. “Excuse me,” says elderly lady. “The queue is back there.” For my flight?
6:30am UK. Still in queue. Slow panic. I have 27 kgs of cabin baggage. 20 kgs permitted. Will they torture me with pins?
6:45am UK. Sardarji waves me in. I try a smile.
6:46am UK. Heave cabin baggage on to the ramp. 27.2 kg. Sardarji makes no comment.
6:47am UK. “I’m afraid there’s some bad news, Mr Subramanian.”
OK, this is it.
It costs 1,000 per kilo.
I’m not allowed on the flight.
I have to compensate by shedding 7 kgs on the spot.
“The flight is delayed by 4 hours.”
Whew.
“Here is your boarding card, and a complementary coupon for breakfast.”
7:00am UK. Call home and convey good news. The flight will therefore land at 7:15am at Chennai — a more decent hour than 3:15am.
8:00am UK. Bored.
8:30am UK. May as well pass security check.
8:40am UK. “Sorry sir. This boarding pass says 19th Feb. Today is the 18th.”
Huh? “But my ticket says 18th Feb.”
“You’ll have to go back to Air India and check with them, sir.”
8:45am UK. Long queue again.
9:00am UK. “Excuse me, this boarding card says 19th Feb. I’m flying today.”
Lady takes my ticket and vanishes.
9:15am UK. “Sorry sir, since the flight was delayed, the computer thought it was tomorrow already. Just take the pass, and they will accept it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Certainly sir.”
“Well, just to be on the safe side, could you call them and tell them?”
“I will, sir.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In front of me, please?”
She gives me a funny look, and picks up the phone.
9:25am UK. At the security gate.
“Excuse me, I have a boarding card for tomorrow, but I’m actually flying today.”
“Hey, Mike…” (… here’s a nutcase?)
“It’s an Air India flight…”
“Oh, OK. Get in.”
9:45am UK. Clear security.
11:00am UK. Hungry. Have breakfast.
12:45pm UK. Flight should have taken off by now, but I’m still at Heathrow, waiting for a boarding announcement.
1:45pm UK. Still waiting.
2:45pm UK. Finally, a boarding announcement. So, flight is 6 hours late, at least. Call home and convey the good news.
3:00pm UK. “Fasten your seatbelt! Fasten your seatbelt!” Air hostess in stern tone.
Guy next to me mutters, “Fasten your seatbelts, please.”
5:30pm UK.“Any food?!” Same air hostess, same tone.
“Vegetarian, please.”
“Open your tray!”
6:00pm UK. Food is lousy. No movies. No books. Laptop: low battery. Can’t sleep.

4:00am India. Flight lands at Mumbai. Haven’t slept. Totally bored.
4:30am India.“All passengers are requested to leave the aircraft.”
“But I’m going to Chennai.”
“You still have to get off, sir.”
5:00am India. “Excuse me, which way for the flight to Chennai?”
“Your flight has already taken off, sir. Please collect your baggage and clear immigration.”
Right.
5:30am India. No luggage yet. Slow panic.
6:00am India. No luggage yet. Rapid panic.
6:10am India. Luggage arrives. Check tag: yes, it’s mine.
6:15am India. “Excuse me, where should Air India passengers for Chennai go to?”
“Why are you asking me? How should I know? Everybody is asking like this only!”
“But…”
“Go! Go there! Stand with everyone!”
6:30am India. Huge mob shouting at Air India staff, who have no clue what’s happening.
7:30am India. Air India staff has vanished.
8:30am India. Rumours that we’re to be put on to a Jet Airways flight.
Chennai passengers are OK, actually. Bangalore passengers only have flights in the evening.
9:00am India. “Go! Take this form and go to the other airport!”
“Is my ticket confirmed on this Jet Airways flight?”
“How do I know? Everything you ask me only. Go! Ask Jet!”
9:30am India. “Excuse me, am I confirmed on the 11:30am flight?”
“Sorry, sir. The flight is booked.”
“Look, I’ve been travelling for a whole day. I’m tired. Can you please do something?”
“I’ll see what I can do, sir.”
To her credit, and Jet Airways’, she got me on that flight.
11:30am India. Jet Airways takes off. On time.
1:30pm India. Flight arrives.
2:00pm India. No luggage. Did Air India transfer it at all?
2:15pm India. Ah, there it is. Pick up luggage from conveyer belt.
“Wait! Sorry, this is my bag.”
Middle-aged man with glasses and thick moustache.
“Um…”
“See? Here’s my yellow tag. I always place a yellow tag for identification.”
“Oh, OK. Sorry. It looked like mine.”
Just to be on the safe side, may as well verify the number…
But he’s gone.
2:30pm India. No luggage. All other bags have arrived.
“Hello sir. Waiting for luggage?”
“Yes. Are there any more bags left?”
“No sir. Only one bag left here. See, is this yours?”
I check. “No.”
“No problem sir, you talk to Jet Airways counter.”
2:40pm India. Jet Airways counter still empty.
2:45pm India. “Sir, this must be an exchange of bags. Does this bag look like yours?”
“Yes, sort of. In fact, someone picked up what looked like my bag.”
2:50pm India. “We have the number of the owner of this bag, sir. We’ll call him.”
“Let me call him as well.”
Mobile is engaged. Leave him a message.
Hi, I think our bags got exchanged. I am still at the airport. Anand.
3:00pm India. Rrring.
“Sorry, sir. I took your bag by mistake!”
“No problem. You wouldn’t have wanted a bag full of diapers anyway.”
“I got confused by the yellow tag.”
“My mother uses a yellow tag as well.”
3:15pm India. We exchange bags.
3:45pm India. Reach home, after nearly 30 hours.

My flight back to the UK was (relatively) uneventful, thanks to having tied pink, yellow and white bands to my luggage this time.

Conflicting policies

March 23, 2006 / Business realities / 8 Comments

A software services firm once asked us, “How come we are not able to staff projects quickly, even though we have a lot of people on the bench?”

There were a bunch of reasons, but among those, we found something interesting. They were implementing two policies that were logical on their own, but disastrous together.

(The bench is where programmers sit when they are not on a project.)

Here’s how they work. When a project starts, the project manager requests resources (people) for the project. HR passes on matching CVs to the project manager, who approves or rejects them, in consultation with the client.

They had two principles. Firtly, all matching CVs that are available are sent to the project manager. This is a good policy because it gives the project manager and the client a lot of options.

Secondly, while a PM is considering a CV, it is not double-submitted to someone else. Again, sensible, because you don’t want two clients asking for the same person at the same time.

But together, these policies killed staffing.

Every CV that is proposed is effectively “out of circulation” until it is accepted or rejected. Yet, the person is still on the bench, and very much “in circulation”. So he can’t be staffed, even though he’s available.

On average, 2.4 CVs were sent for every request. On average, a manager would hold the CV for 10 days. So, every request enforces 24 person-days of compulsary bench-time.

On a typical day, 75% of CVs were locked up this way. For example, on 22 Dec 2003, 291 CVs out of 384 were proposed for resumes. So a new request would have less than a quarter of the available bench to pick from.

No wonder they were complaining they couldn’t staff quickly enough, even though they had a large bench.

Demand draft fees

March 21, 2006 / Business realities / 9 Comments

Once, we were looking at whether banks made money on demand drafts (DDs).

DDs are costly. 90% of a bank’s costs are people-related, and it takes a fair bit of time (hence people) to process DDs. If you pay for DDs in cash, it costs even more because the teller has to count the notes.

To recover this cost, banks charge a fee. The fee increases with the size of the DD. A DD for Rs 10,000 may cost Rs 50, while one for Rs 100,000 may cost Rs 200.

But apart from the fee, banks also earn float on the DD. Let’s say you go to a bank, pay Rs 100,000, and take a DD. You mail the DD to someone, who cashes the DD three days later. The bank has your Rs 100,000 for 3 days, and earns the overnight interest rate at around 5%, netting Rs 41 in the process. This float is significant for large DDs.

Our client bank was making a small loss on DDs. Every DD less than Rs 50,000 caused a loss (even after including float). And 3 out of every DDs was smaller than Rs 50,000.

Then we had this bright idea: let’s lower fee for large DDs, attract of them, and get more float income. DDs above Rs 50,000 are profitable. So big DDs are worth going after. 80% of the float income comes from the top 22% of DDs. So surely, the big DDs are worth going after. Float income increases forever, whereas fee income is capped. So big DDs could absolutely be terrific.

We were thrilled. Here was a revolutionary counter-intuitive idea: have lower charges for DDs to get more money. We kept talking about it to our client. But at the end, we didn’t suggest it. It got left behind the conventional idea of increasing the fee for small DDs.

We were a bit disappointed, and kept cursing the conservatism of public sector banks. Goes to show how the bright young consultants can be naive. For, as it later turned out, the bulk of DD revenues is really fee income (88%), not float income. Had we lowered the fee income, there’s would’ve been no chance for the float income to make up for it.

Why did we miss that? A couple of reasons. The simple one was, though the float income increases forever, doesn’t beat fee income until the DD is about Rs 2 crores. DDs typically stay with you for a few days, and you can’t earn much interest on that.

The other reason was subtler. We had assumed that the float income for a DD of Rs 100,000 is 100 times that of the DD income for Rs 1,000. But the float income does not increase linearly! Someone who gets a DD for Rs 1,000 doesn’t mind waiting a bit to present it, but someone who gets a DD for a lakh would walk to the bank the very same day. The chart below shows how long customers wait to cash DDs. The X-axis is the size of the DD. The Y-axis is the number of days they wait. It shows a clear diminishing trend.

Plot of DDs by value on X-axis and number of days to clear on Y-axis

Lesson: Conservative bankers might make more money not listening to hotshot consultants.

Vacation 2006

February 16, 2006 / Links / 5 Comments

I am on vacation, and probably won’t update until 20th March 2006.

MP3 bitrates and sound quality

February 10, 2006 / How I do things / 11 Comments

At what bitrate should you encode your MP3 files? Listening tests show that at 256kbps, you can’t tell the difference. But that’s with 2 amplifiers and big speakers. What about headphones?

I tried an experiment with my cousin, who has the best ear for music that I know. We ripped a good audio CD of his at 128 kbps. He put on a pair of headphones (the kind that fit into your ear) connected to my laptop. I played the first half a minute of the original and the ripped version 10 times, in a random order, asking him to guess which was which. Result: 5 correct and 5 wrong. He couldn’t tell the difference.

We tried again, ripping at 64kbps this time. Same experiment, and surprisingly, same result — 5 correct and 5 wrong.

Conclusion: With a pair of headphones, even a good ear can’t tell the difference between a 64kbps MP3 and an original CD. So, if you want to cram in more songs into your iPod, just re-encode them at 64kbps. You’ll easily shrink the size in half, as most of them are at least 128kbps.