By Christopher Johnson

By now many of you are checking your
mail boxes to open the mail from your loved ones as well as facing
bills from your suppliers which are difficult to pay. But wait what
about those firms that keep their mail box keys in the office.
Because you cannot go to your office you cannot recover your keys to
empty your mail box.

This gives rise to consider problems
that our deep thinking Government forgot in their wisdom to address.
The knock on effect in deeply concerning.

Many suppliers still send out their
invoices and monthly statements by mail. If the customer does not
receive them they cannot be paid. Moreover some firms like mine which
pays most bills by cheque left the cheque book in the office. Thus
suppliers will not get paid. If they cannot get paid how do they meet
their financial commitments including paying employees. If employees
are not paid how can they pay their bills.

The next and less important facet of
all of this is the mail boxes themselves. Not many are ten feet
square to accommodate several weeks of mail. Thus much mail lies in
the mail bags accumulating at the various post offices.

This reminds me of a story of the
seventies which demonstrates the practical thinking of the people of
our island. One Christmas the post office had serious difficulty
clearing the mail. Bags of mail were to be seen stacked to the
rafters at the George Town Post Office and clearly we were not going
to receive our Christmas cards from our loved ones. In stepped the
Chamber of Commerce when one Saturday some 20 highly qualified
wannabe post office clerks stepped into the breach and cleared all
the mail with the help of a lady whose name I just cannot recall, who
knew everyones mail box number if they had one. Thus cards sent
without box numbers found their way home.

This goes to show how we could get
things done in those days using a practical approach. So CIG let us
visit our offices to retrieve our keys to empty the mail boxes
before the bags are stacked to the roof.