The Trinidad Guardian -Online Edition Ver 2.0

The company we love to hate...

But this is real madness. It concerns everybody’s pet hate, TSTT. I personally witnessed a friend put on hold for over one hour while he tried to call their service line. Can you believe that? And to make matters worse, he had to listen to message after message about TSTT’s great services. You can’t blame a man for going “postal” when you treat him like that.

Hurry up Digicel.

You want some more Trini madness? How about being told by the Motor Vehicle Licensing Office in San Fernando that you have to wait eight weeks to get a certified copy! In the bad old days when they used their computers it used to be the same day. Now they do it all manually. Can you believe that? They should simply put up a Web site where anyone can go and see exactly who owns what vehicle. If you pay $10 they will tell you anyway but it takes eight weeks. Can someone go in and tell these people about 2020 please?

Now while this is not madness as such, and I must be very respectful here, on March 18 nearly every Syrian-owned store in Port-of-Spain closed for a whole day because a prominent member of that community died.

Now I believe in paying respect etc, but in the world of 2020, we must also understand that consideration for others takes a very high priority. I had the embarrassing situation of meeting a friend at Piarco who, on my urging, had come in just for the day to go shopping downtown only to find lots of stores closed. Her trip was entirely wasted. She asked how did T&T believe it could be considered for FTAA HQ status when it conducted its business affairs like a village council. I just had to take the licks but she had a point.

PQT’s awards for excellence

My first award goes to the two policemen who pulled up in their police car at 10.15 on March 18, on the Churchill Roosevelt Highway by the El Socorro walkover to shield a driver from oncoming traffic while he changed a flat tyre—2020 conduct. Well done, gentlemen.

My second award goes to the Government of Singapore for a wonderful Web site full of information on every aspect of their country, economy , government etc. To see what we should be doing go to http://www.singstat.gov.sg/keystats/economy.html.

And my third award goes to our own Government for building tele-centres around T&T to provide micro and small business owners with easy access to the Internet, faxing, photocopying etc.

Let’s hope they are open from early in the morning to late at night and don’t frustrate their users with “de cashier gone home” etc. An even better idea would be to lease out the facilities to a young entrepreneur to run.

Why can’t we keep our doctors

From time to time I try to find facts to explain the low standard of healthcare in this country. A quick look at the statistics at the UNDP Web site at http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/cty/cty_f_TTO.html revealed a possible explanation. Take a look at the graph with this article and it compares the number of doctors in various countries for every 100,000 of population.

Notice that 2020 developed countries have over 160 where as we have only 75. But not only do we have less than half the number of doctors they feel are necessary, we are trailing behind quite a few other Caribbean countries. So why should this be? Is it because we don’t pay our doctors enough to make it worth their while staying?

Is it because there is too much political interference in our health sector? Is it because the frustrations of dealing with the public servants, who run the health ministry, burn out even the most dedicated of doctors?

For, make no mistake, a doctor is a highly desirable asset and countries that can get one for free from us without having paid one penny for their training are onto a bargain. Indeed, it would be most interesting to see a chart of the percentage of doctors we train that stay in T&T. Can anyone e-mail me those numbers?

Of course we could do the same as the developed countries and lay out a red carpet for any doctor who would like to come and work here. I’ve never understood the crazy rational behind our work-permit scheme.

An organisation applies to bring in some highly skilled person that we don’t have and, instead of doing everything we can to try and keep this asset here, we harass his employers, grant work permits for absurdly short periods of time and generally make life miserable for the person.

Indeed we even call them “aliens” so that tells you what we think of them. For my part, I would offer any qualified doctor an automatic work permit with permanent residency available for the asking, just like they do in 2020 countries.

Just a thought.