Electricity to emotional backup

Aug 31, 2025

An average Saturday in our house of 3 working women living together is catching up on chores. A couple of hours in errand morph into half the day spent in seconds. One such chore that we’ve had pending was calling our newly appointed UPS provider. The problem? to check why our power backup exhausts in 20 minutes which is a fourth of the time promised to us. They’d been bailing on us for over 2 weeks, so we chose to freeze their payment until the issue got resolved. Finally, after a 10:30AM commitment, the guys showed at 2:30PM IST and we got it done in a huff. Post that, the flatmate handling UPS transactions set off to make the payment. An error in copy pasting the number resulted in money sent to the wrong account. She let us know and we embarked on another problem to solve. She’d already raised a complaint with the bank to stop the transaction, when I suggested to call the number as well, “Bank will take time to resolve. But if the person on the other side is able understand and revert, we won’t have to go through the trouble”.

So, we called. No response.

“Let’s drop a message on whatsapp and see if it goes through.”

English is not our first language but due to difference in regional languages we use it by default. Cognisant that they may not understand it on the other end, we simplified it as much as we could. “Apologise” became “sorry” and “inconvenience” became “trouble”. We sent it with an attached screenshot of the transaction.

We finally got a response, ”Hi”.

Our response? “Let’s call now to try and explain the situation without having things lost in communication”.

She called. A guy picked up and spoke in kannada - the vernacular of the region we’re living in. Now, we've been here for a while but because it's a cosmopolitan area, we never felt the need to learn it. All I know in kannada is: “don’t know kannada”, “give”, “take”, “do”. So, in a rare event of me needing it at all, I get by with broken hindi, some english and these verbs and phrases.

Anyways, after 1st unsuccessful attempt, she gave us an update. This time, I called and said “don’t know kannada”, “do text” in the vernacular. The guy laughed and said some sentences we did not understand. We had to cut the call to come to a resolution instead of entertaining this more. We also got 2 whatsapp messages in vernacular which we went on to translate using chatGPT.

We got a video call from the guy, we cut. We got incessant calls that we kept cutting and a message again. We responded with “don’t know kannada, using a translator, please text”. We get a voice note and more calls, we cut. We drop the same message again. We finally got a message in english, “sex video hd 🖕”. Enraged me wanted to pick up a call to abuse and yell but we chose to not entertain and blocked the number.

We start getting normal calls from an unknown number. Although we knew it could be the creepy guy, we chose to give it a fraction of benefit of doubt and I picked up. The guy repeated the message sent and I lost it.
I said, “bhak, madarchod”, cut the call and blocked the number.

We got one call from the old number again, we cut and blocked that from system as well. Concluded the matter with money lost for the 20 minutes we spent.

The situation got a lot easier to deal with since we were not alone and we had each other. But this got us thinking about how limited our worldview is. Because for all practical purposes, in the beginning, we didn’t consider this scenario at all. Although, such events are so common that unless you're living under a rock, you're bound to go through this.

“bhak, madarchod” - literal translation “run motherfucker”. Implied translation - “fuck off, motherfucker”.