Hutch eTopUp Refill

Hutch shop.

The etopup refill (that's is the name given to the very useful idea) lets you refill your talktime for any amount upto two ninty nine. Amazing new schemes coming out from all service providers. MTNL, BSNL and Reliance are the cheapest in the market, and then there is the forever alive AirTel 999 scheme, which gives you a lifetime of incoming calls free. there is also the extremely flexible validity/talktime offer from iDea. The problem with Orange is that although prepaid customers can ride out their validity by refilling their talktime, they cannot ride out accumulated talktime by refilling their validity. Cautious users (ironically, these prepaid customers would have benefited by opting for postpaid - a loss to Orange, as postpaid is cheaper than prepaid for the same usage) have accumulated huge amounts of talktime over many months, and continue to refill their validity as well as talktime. I had accumulated six hundred once, and blew all of it in National Roaming during one Bangalore trip. Now however, I use the ETopUp refill from the hutch shop every few days, riding out my validity without wasting any money on that. The five bucks advantage is a fib to explain all of the above to a friend who is too technologically challenged to know the difference between talktime and validity.

The friend's version of the following events can be read on his blog here

The eTopUp facility seems to be pretty popular as many users had shown up at the shop. This meant that one of the workers there showed me to this machine, an amazing concept of automatic refilling, Basically, it is a kiosk that works as an ATM and you can refill it using the simple interface. Problem was that although the system was pretty fast and efficient, it wouldn't accept my old fifty rupee note (the other one being lent to a friend) and therefore, I had to head back to the main shop for the normal mode. Here, I fill in a slip, hand it over to the fellow at the counter, he sends me an sms refilling my account, and I sign on a receipt. All of this was "complex paperwork" to the technologically and probably even logically challenged friend.

Really good facility, they just need to iron out a few wrinkles. Or probably I should have tried the machine again after flattening my fifty rupee note. Or probably I should carry all my money in a wallet instead of simply shoving them in my pants beside the wallet...