The other morning, the director/manager responsible for the citizenship section at Evans Building took the decision to stop accepting ‘customers’ at 10am instead of the established time of 11am. A piece of paper was affixed to the door leading to the office stating that “Due to unforeseen circumstances customers will not be accepted after 10am…” (followed by the usual sentence)… “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The section’s website, however, still showed the closing time as the usual 11am.

Of course, people were still walking in after 10am only to find the ‘queue’ ticket number machine locked and being informed that they would not be served. Many of these were mothers with young children, some in push chairs.

This situation caused a lot of bewilderment, anger and frustration because most of the visitors had made their own special arrangements for the day to be able to attend to their requirements. The director, or manager, was nowhere to be seen to face the customers, try to placate them and, perhaps, find a solution to a problem which, after all, was of his or her own making.

Instead, one of the female clerks there was left (abandoned would be a better word) to face this situation as best she could.

The incident seems to be another example of incompetent persons being put in positions of management within the civil service without their being trained or prepared for it.

In this incident all the basic rules of professional management and customer care were broken. Above all, it reflects the utter disdain with which the public (the customer) is held by many government departments. It must be pointed out, however, that the clerks who were attending to the people’s needs were helpful and courteous.