Robotics and online facilities disadvantageous to pensioners

Dear Editor,

The Postal Service today is an exact replica of what, in structure and system, it was in the colonial era, except that the quality of management then was highly respected. Successive Postmasters General were easily identifiable as performers comparably qualified as counterpart heads of Department in a separately structured civil service of the day. Postmen, impressively uniformed, were seen as persons of worth, even though functioning at a sub-professional level. On the other hand, character references from the level of postmasters were considered as most acceptable by other employers.

In a smaller population and slower paced economy, service was centred in the very General Post Office building which still stands, but which prominently included a thriving Savings Bank component that, in contrast to its male postal actors, was staffed almost exclusively by females.

The building was occupied by other agencies, including the Income Tax Department, and of course the very human Births and Deaths Registry. So far as postal services were concerned, the system was not only efficient, but the local postmaster was at least on neighbourly terms with members of his community, except that his station provided in 1950 exactly the limited services being experienced in 2018.

One outstanding example has been the parcel postal service. Nothing has changed. Management over the years has totally ignored the fact that, for instance, the volume of traffic between the diaspora and this country, as well as across the Regions locally, is overflowing; and has shown no creativity whatsoever in providing the expanding clientele of, say greater Georgetown and its environs, with parcel post services compatible with widespreading demands. No parcel post service has been available at any other location than the GPO in the town centre, over the last seven or eight decades.

Those who await long hours in queues are usually individuals with little capacity for complaining about the personal treatment they sometimes suffer.

But they have no choice, since it is not possible (in 2018) to post a normal size book at the local post office – to any other part of the city, for example. So then parcel posting could involve considerable costs – in travelling, hours waiting in line, and the possibility of having to return to another queue another day at the GPO.

It is a situation particularly painful for older folk, some of whom, with disabilities, must rely on their families’ help.

Yet it is in the light of this substantive organisational performance deficit one hears of impending robotics and online facilities.

Those of us who have to wait ‘in line’ now for current robotic service from the human resources, must wonder what quality and quantum of survey would have been undertaken in order to advise on:

i) the target groups that would