Dear Editor,
I have recently had occasion to make visits to the passport office and the NIS. I am pleased to proclaim that I was treated courteously by everyone who attended to me. However, I was taken aback by the strange practice of what I can only call ‘musical chairs without the music’: Customers are asked to keep moving down the line of seats, until they get to a destined one, at which seat they are subsequently called up to receive attention.
I found it quaint and amusing at the passport office. At the NIS office I found it uncomfortable after I had moved through the first line, and then downright annoying after I was half-way down the second, not because the treatment there was any different or the seats less comfortable, but because I had done it before-this ‘dressin down’ game that lasted more than an hour in each place.
I now wonder whether the persons who devised this system have ever had to experience it.
While the practice may provide some form of exercise for the habitually sedentary elder, I am not sure of its value. My knowledge of basic hygiene calls it into question (over those two days, I sat in more than one hundred public seats), and I feel silly bobbing up and down every three or four minutes to get to the next seat.
I humbly offer a suggestion: What about if we are asked to record our names as we enter, or take a number; sit in any seat we choose; read peacefully as we wait or make passing acquaintance with the fellow Guyanese sitting be-side us; then proceed to the relevant public officer when they politely call our name or number?
I understand that I also need to get a new Birth Certi-ficate. Should I walk with my music?
Yours faithfully,
Charlene Wilkinson
