# Notebook

Costly oversight

No doubt technology has made one’s life easier and comfortable but at the same time it has also made one…

Statesman News Service | June 11, 2018 12:36 am

No doubt technology has made one’s life easier and comfortable but at the same time it has also made one lazy. Also, the trouble is, we tend to trust it blindly, thinking a machine can never make any mistake. However, at times, this over-dependence on technology can prove to be costly, a colleague asserted. He narrated how a group of students in Patna, all of them medical aspirants, went to a cyber café to fill online the application form for the combined medical entrance examination, NEET.

All of them filled and submitted the forms successfully. But, as is quite common among online applicants, none of them bothered to re-read the forms once they were completed. After some days, when the admit cards were released, all the students were in for a huge surprise.

They found to their consternation that instead of allotting their exam centre in Patna, which they had specifically asked for, they were given Patan, which is located in Gujarat. Without thinking or bothering to cross-check, they began cursing the examination department for allotting them their examination centre in another state.

That was until one of the girls checked application forms that were filled online. It was then that it emerged that they had clicked on Patan and not Patna, which comes lower down on the alphabetical list. Apparently, they had all mistakenly thought there was a perhaps a spelling error and that the last two alphabets had been interchanged. Little did they realise that such a place did exist!