Memory is often not the best storehouse for trivial information – it’s an arbitrary process which often excludes something that turns out to be important – so I have developed this habit of jotting down, on a notebook or my computer, transient thoughts or reactions on a range of subjects. Here are some recent topics under the heading of ‘Practices We Should Abandon.’
In a recent note in my scribbling, I wrote that it’s time to stop this archaic practice in Guyana of putting Post Office stamps on receipts. To watch this ritual being carried out is to confirm how firmly we have both feet anchored in a form of backwardness. When one considers the time taken up by persons delivering this ritual, it is clearly a waste of labour besides being a drain on the patience of both parties. Furthermore, consider the impact of this banality on the persons who are required to affix the stamps. Imagine someone admitting, “Part of my job is to put stamps on receipts.” We should leave that relic behind, as we should also the ancient practice of the handwritten receipts themselves, laboriously made out by hand, with the obligatory carbon-paper copy, and, still seen far too often, the final embarrassment of a ruler being used to tear off the receipt. Imagine also the horror of having to keep those receipts books (what does the law require – 5 years?). Just picture the thousands of square feet of dusty cluttered space in this country holding old receipt books when all that information can be stored digitally on a chip you can hold in your hand. What happens to all these thousands of receipt documents anyway? In what cavernous vault are such things stored, and at what cost, and to what end? Perhaps, the biggest joke is that they are not kept at all.
Another aggravation is the matter of banks in Guyana refusing to change a US$ bill into smaller denominations. In today’s business environment, where US notes are in common use worldwide, why, for instance, can I not change my US$20 into four US$5 bills? I can understand the concerns about laundering money that
