A Fresh Perspective

Walking along Canterbury high street on a warm summer’s Saturday afternoon, the bustling backstreets are busy with people meeting friends and visiting the city. It’s lovely. The larger groups of audio-touring EU tourists tend to always find themselves stopping in front of me suddenly, but I don’t mind. They are welcome here, for it is a lovely city I wish to share. Canterbury Residents and daytrippers co-exist in peaceful harmony. As we meander, we learn to at least try to read each other’s minds, and we avoid bumping into each other as often as possible.

Sometimes it can be hard to work out what is going on in one person’s mind, but it’s a lot harder when there are many minds to read. On the high street, piercing the mind of a single person can be achieved with a glance, the brief eye contact as you both walk through a doorway at the same time and share a 1.5-second glance, within which a complex exchange of mutual understanding takes place, a technique mastered over thousands of years of close quarters body language communication, perfection and evolution. And, without a word being spoken, a decision is made, and one person lets the other through the door before themselves - and our evolutionary excellence has saved us once again.

However, we don’t use it any more. That particular eye-contact thing? It’s rare. We email each other. We post online. We have organised into massive disorganisations that do little for our evolution and make little time for glances that tell a story. Bureaucracy sets in. Auto-responders kick in. And This makes understanding the actions of a council-type organisation, a bit on the tricky side.

Over many years, a process has built a kind of dogma and often nonsense way of getting something done. Usually there are many smart people within the organisation that are even quite aware that there is probably a quicker, simpler way of getting a job done. But every now and then, the gears of the rinse & repeat methods are stopped in their tracks, a spanner in the works.

A Facebook group poster recently spoke about a carer who received a parking ticket while waiting for paramedics to arrive at a situation she needed assistance for. For the carer, this was a real spanner in the works. Canterbury City Council were appealed to, and down came a request for a form of evidence to go with the appeal - they have a process which says there always needs to be some form of evidence. Fair? Probably, until you learn that the documents requested by the council are covered under patient confidentiality and GDPR; and let’s be honest, it’s just generally not proper to start throwing around an innocent patient’s medical records to sort out a parking ticket dispute.

Personally, I wasn’t aware this sort of incident could occur and I can’t be the only one. I expect, and hope, that the council simply needed a jolt out of the copy-paste approach, and the matter is sorted now - but it took the social media post to do that, and the damage was already done. When the ticket was issued, a spanner henceforth was also thrown into the city council’s gears, as they would be dealing with the fallout of something caused not intentionally, and most probably easily solvable once it was caught.

I’m not saying that a face-toface glance would have stopped this parking ticket in its tracks. I’m not suggesting we replace all emails with face-to-face glances on warm summer’s evenings. Technology has a vital role to play in our lives, slimming down the amount of time and money certain repetitive tasks take, but some, like column writing and parking appeal decisions, should never be tasks asked of our autonomous bots - at least for now.