Service from hell

IF I WERE to die tomorrow, and for some reason get permanently stuck in limbo between Heaven and Hell, that limbo would consist of me being perpetually 17, sitting on those long, uncomfortable wooden benches in the heat of the Licensing Office on Wrightson Road, waiting to get my very first driver’s license, for all of eternity. It was so many years ago, but I can still remember the hell that is the Licensing Office. What should be a seemingly simple procedure of signing the paperwork to receive a driver’s permit took an entire day of my life. I had arrived early o’clock in the morning to try and beat the crowds, but it was summer time and every other 17-year-old in Trinidad had the same idea. What I remember the most was the endless back and forth. Go to one counter to pay the cashier for a form. Take the receipt to someone else to stamp it. Pay them to stamp it. Take the stamped receipt back to the original person.

Sit for an hour or two or three, then get up and go to some other place on the compound to sit in another room. Go to get your picture taken for the license. Then the cashiers close for lunch and you wait, patiently, because you cannot leave and lose your place, or have them call your name with you not there. By then you are considering bashing your sweaty head on the wall, which is probably why everyone’s driver’s license picture looks like they’ve just spent a day in hell! I can give you another perfect example of service from hell — when I went to register to vote in Scott House on Frederick Street. I figured it wouldn’t take long; I had all my documents, I was prepared. Little did I know I would again be subjected to endless hours of cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of the service demons. Thank God the building was air conditioned — that was one small saving grace.

But after four hours of waiting in the room for Diego Martin East voters, I was denied and told to come back another day. See, my birth certificate was in French (issued in Quebec), and they took one look at it, scratched their head and said, “Well, we eh know what dat is, but we cah read dat, ah doh know what tuh tell yuh.” So that was that. Dismissed. After an entire day wasted I left there fuming, and to this day I am still not a registered voter, and quite frankly I don’t particularly care to go back! Perhaps one of the most infuriating service hells is that lovely little wrecking yard on the Beetham where they take your car after they swarm down on it like hungry corbeaux on a dead dog. At the wrecking yard, the officers seem to move in slow motion, just like the fans circulating the hot air. They open those big ledger books, write down the vital information painstakingly by hand and finally issue your receipt and let you leave (but, if you are a female, only after giving you some “friendly” chat).

Once when my car was wrecked, I arrived to find my license plate broken in two, and after ranting and raving at them, asking them who was going to pay for my new license plate, the man simply eyed me indifferently, told me it wasn’t their fault, that they are protected by law, and there was nothing I could do about it. He also kindly suggested that if I felt so strongly about it, perhaps I should write a letter to the Attorney General. I admitted defeat and walked out of there on the verge of pulling out my hair. There is one vital thing that you will notice all service hells have in common — almost no computers! In the court houses, in the wrecking yard, in the Licensing Office, in Scott House, in the Ministry offices, in the police stations, in all of the important government services offered to the public that should help them register and access important information, almost everything is done by hand, on paper, and without fail by the slowest person in the building.

It seems our service institutions are about fifty years behind schedule, and the kind of people who work there have no motivation to perform efficiently because they understand how the system works. Because of the menial tasks involved — filing, stamping, giving out forms, tuning the radio station — the kind of people employed in such places are unmotivated and simply there to collect a paycheck, lime and talk with their co-workers, or maybe stamp your paper if they are not too busy filing their nails. They arrive the minute they must clock in and leave the very second their shift is over, even if they are in the middle of dealing with you. This leaves us, the average citizen, with no choice but to waste an entire productive day sitting in some government office waiting for something that, with the aid of a computerised system and trained employees, should take no more than an hour. The heavy reliance on paperwork is firstly very time consuming and a great inconvenience and aggravation to the general public who cannot afford to spend an entire day waiting to fill out some forms.

Secondly, paperwork consumes a lot of space — most of these places have rooms full of filing cabinets and piles of books everywhere. And thirdly, it makes it very difficult to reference past documents, because instead of pulling it up on a computer system, someone has to go and search by hand for the specific document, which is likely to be misplaced or damaged. And no, I don’t believe that this is simply some unique facet of our culture, or that it is in some way “acceptable” because that is just part of “life in Trinidad” and we should all shrug it off and laugh at our quirky third-world post-colonial ways. No, that is not good enough. As I write this, there is probably some poor soul sitting in the Licensing Office, sweating, looking at his watch as he waits patiently for his number to be called so that he can fill out his forms and go home. By the magical year “2020” will these crucial governmental organisations still be old, dingy, dark buildings with no air-conditioning and no computers and no intelligent life forms? Are we doomed to wallow in service hell forever?