Before I moved to India, of course I figured out how my electrical appliances would work here and if I would need a travel adapter. There were mixed advices about travel adapters, but all the websites were unanimous that the amount of voltage would be the same as in the Netherlands. So I should be able to use my appliances without any trouble. However, that doesn’t guarantee that they will be working, because there are many black-outs here in India.
In the beginning I didn’t needed a traval adapter, because all my appliances were still working. But after some time, my laptop started to behave a bit strange: it got super hot. So hot even that the whole outsite started to melt away. I’m not sure if I should blame the Indian power network, but I had to find a solution.
Luckily, everything is fixable in India. There’s always a guy who knows a guy, of course the best one in this sort of field. So they took me to the reparation guy. Unfortunately this guy didn’t work with the laptop brand that I have. You see often that these fixers only work with specific brands, so we had to try it somewhere else. But everywhere we came, nobody knew my laptop brand, so nobody was able to fix my laptop.
For international computer brands (like mine), you have to be in the real big cities. At least, that’s what I thought. Luckily we had a hockey tournament in Delhi in a few weeks, so they could help me there. I Googled for the right location where there should be a shop that should be able to fix my laptop brand. This brought me to a square in between a few flats with all these kind of computer shops. Some for just some specific brands, some for all brands. Because of my previous experiences I tried to search for a shop with my computer brand.
Eventually I found the right shop, but they only sold computers overthere. So the reparation store should be somewhere in the surrounding flats. I received a direction, the name of the building and in the building I had to find room six on the 6th floor. Of course there were no names on the buildings, and the building I had to be was build into several several buildings. So after a good search I found the right staircase. And although it felt like I was entering a bit of a ghetto like place, I finally found the repair store. They were very happy that I came to them to get my laptop repaired. But quickely we realised that this shop was not able to fix my laptop.
Without a laptop the world stands still, so I really needed a new one. Luckily there are also in India websites like Amazon, which deliver right to your frontdoor. So I found a good deal, ordered a laptop online and filled in a deliver address. And this is also different from how we do this in the Netherlands. They do have a streetname, but a house number doesn’t exist. The address I filled in was from the hotel I stayed at the moment and close by should be a cinema. So apparently the dilvery company would deliver the laptop to the cinema.
After a few days the delivery guy found the hotel where I stayed. I received the package and walked happy to my room, where I found out… the box was empty. It only contained an adapter. The customer service was very kind, but they couldn’t help me any further. So again, I ordered a new laptop. This time with some help of my Indian colleagues. They advised me to order with the option ”cash on delivery”. So when I received the new laptop, I first opened the package, checked if everything was there (there was!). So I paid the deliver guy, who was calmly waiting. So now, all’s well and I finally have a laptop again.
