Yesterday I got my aging tablet's screen protector changed. What should have been a simple and quick visit to a mobile phone outlet turned out to be not so simple after all; I had to visit four such places before I could get this done. At each of the first three outlets, the response was that such services were not done there.
All of these outlets are located in a mall, one of the so-called trendier and happening ones in the city. You know how things are with malls: a lot of people strolling about, crowds at places like food courts and theatres, and most of the empty shops filled with bored salespeople with nothing to do but entertain themselves with fantasies of how they would like to push the strolling folks over the walkway rails.
The key word here is 'salespeople'; people who are trained to sell the stuff (I'm being quite generous with the word 'training' here), and nothing else.
There is a lot of talk about value-creation, moving up the value chain and so on, but this doesn't seem to translate very well into practice. We still have college graduates being churned out in their thousands every year, with degrees that are worth less than the paper they're printed on, with no real skills (and no, 'I have excellent communication skills and am a team player' is not a skill, even allowing for the invariable resume embellishment). The three or four years--don't get me started on engineering degrees--spent on getting a degree would have been much better spent in acquiring real skills like learning how to fix a car, cook a mean baingan bharta, or build a cabinet for a home entertainment system.
Or change the screen protector for a tablet.
