Frustrated – once more

 Debbie Jacob -
Debbie Jacob -

THIS LOOKS promising. The Laventille government office on Frederick Street where you get a TT ID card has only five people sitting inside the waiting room when I enter. Once again, I am going to try for an ID card. On a good day, I feel the clerks will run out of requirements to invent. The odds must be in my favour at some point.

I reach up to take a number from the machine. “No numbers?” I ask. My five comrades don’t answer. One shakes his head. This feels like the scene in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where Marlow goes for his job interview to work in the Congo – you know, the scene with the two women sitting at the entrance knitting black wool.

No one is at the window. I watch two smiling young men working at desks behind the counter. One is on his cellphone. They seem to have no work to do. A woman steps forward and says, “Have a seat. There are no numbers so I will call you.”

There’s nothing to do but watch the scowl on her face. A seventh person walks up to the counter and she barks orders for him to sit down. “There are no numbers,” she says.

This seems to disturb her greatly. She traces the steps of one of the young men at the desk who has just got up to open the door separating the office and the waiting room. The two men at the door laugh and this makes the woman behind the counter more agitated.

She barks at him, “There are no numbers.”

I wonder why they don’t solve that problem.

The surly public servant asks for documents, which she tosses on the counter. As she exhausts all possible questions, in the meanest voice she can muster, I say, “This isn’t fun for us either.”

This cranks her anger up another level. I turn away for a moment and note the stone-cold look of apathy on the people’s faces behind me. I’m thinking we could probably make a point here about public service and kindness, but this group isn’t going to muster any emotion capable of serving as my troops.

The woman says, “Where’s your certified copy of your status in Trinidad and Tobago from immigration? You can’t get an ID card without that document from immigration?”

Now I am wilting. Got me once again, I think.

“An immigration officer said I have to get an ID card so I can reapply for citizenship. They lost my file.”

For 35 years immigration bounced me back and forth between its office and National Security looking for my lost file. Once I was even summoned to immigration for being illegal. Someone reported me, but I produced my permanent residence papers and didn’t get deported.

After decades of looking for my file, immigration said reapply. When I did, the immigration officer greeted me with a smile saying, “Look! We found your file.”

She rummaged through the file and said I had to prove I hadn’t left the country for more than a year.

I dipped into the new set of documents and said, “Look. Here are all my NIS payments and all my passport stamps for the last 30 years.”

“No,” she said. She sent me for an affidavit. When I returned, immigration had gone on strike, and I lost my appointment. I later learned my file came up missing again.

And now I need an ID card, which I can’t get without status from a missing file.

Finally, this is the end, I think, as I walk outside. I am not entitled to an ID card. Well, I think, the good news is this is one less government office that can subject me to its condescending procedures.

I set my sights on a simpler task: getting a bank statement, which I need for NIS retirement payments. The bank corrects the misspelled name of the street; then informs me in this digital age that it can’t print a corrected copy for one week.

My day is shot. I have accomplished nothing, and I am left with needless frustration. Customer service – in both the private and public sectors – falls short once again. Customer service could provide a sense of pride and accomplishment – a model for productivity to inspire us all. Instead, it tramples our sense of dignity and instills a feeling of hopelessness in us. I am thinking about how easy it is to feel marginalised and unworthy in this country.

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"Frustrated – once more"

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