The joys of a New Kingston discovery

I SUSPECT that one of the great joys in life is to make a momentous discovery, especially when one did not set out to look for it. I had such an experience last week. And would you believe it, it occurred right in the heart of New Kingston. Picture a combination of the sciences of archaeology and palaeontology and then the movie "Jurassic Park" thrown in for effect and you get an understanding of the extent of my discovery.

I had gone to New Kingston to transact some business at the Western Union office there and had resigned myself to what seems to be nowadays, the mandatory long wait. The length of the line I joined signalled that I was in for business as usual. But this line seemed to be moving briskly, which was distinctly atypical. Soon it was my turn, I tendered my material and the required identification document, my driver's licence to the clerk.

I have been around people who write shorthand for a lifetime and I have never before seen anyone write anything at all so fast. As she completed my transaction and handed me the proceeds I just knew she had gone so fast that she had forgotten something. I had been used to her counterparts taking a seeming eternity to copy what they needed to copy from this document. I often wondered how they found so many things to copy from such a seeming Spartan document. And this lady had not even removed the document from the slot in which I had placed it. But when I reminded her of the neglect she told me breezily that she had done all that already.

At the risk of being perceived as "a dirty old man" I just had to ask her name. "Coleen Ruthland" she wrote with the same deftness on a slip of paper.

The experience, apart from inducing me to shout, "Eureka", caused me to marvel at how it was possible without effort to dig up a fossil of a dinosaur and have it come to life before your eyes!

If Miss Ruthland is what she seems to me I wonder how long the system will take to get her to conform to the seeming mandatory orthodoxy? Such a creature can hardly expect to survive without evolution or more likely mutation. It is an aberration and the system does not tolerate such phenomena.

She will either have to conform or be interred to be dug up by archaeologists eons from now who will try to establish the reason or reasons her kind went extinct.

On the other hand her employer could take note of her seeming effective performance and reward her accordingly; perhaps on the workload which she accomplishes. A contract arrangement might be appropriate!

Of course an alternative course of action could be to give Miss Ruthland accelerated promotion to the point where as the "Peter Principle" observes, the point of incompetence is reached. Come to think of it that seems the logical course to follow since it would eventually restore equilibrium to the status quo.

My experience at another level serves as a reminder of just how low is the general level of service almost everywhere today. In banks, in stores, wherever you go it seems that it is the service person who is important and the customer secondary. Even in journalism it seems the principle applies to say nothing of that bastion of privilege, the public service!

I remember years ago after successive political regimes had grown the service well beyond necessity and there was a national debate about reducing it. A perceptive friend turned to me one day and observed: "Reynolds, you know the civil service could perform much better with a third fewer employees!" Then he turned contemplative and added: "But knowing how the system works they would be sure to get rid of the wrong third!"

But I suspect hope might be entertained that Miss Ruthland and her kind, if she is not the "Last of the Mohicans" will survive and grow in numbers. After all cloning is now a reality. So there may be hope for a brighter day!

C. Roy Reynolds is a freelance journalist.

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