The downside of development

Reminiscing about this reminded me that “development” is a “two steps forward, three steps back” kind of affair. This is usually evident in developed countries where when things are good they are very, very good, but when things are bad, they are rotten! ILLUSTRATION/NATION

What you need to know:

  • Reminiscing about this reminded me that “development” is a “two steps forward, three steps back” kind of affair. This is usually evident in developed countries where when things are good they are very, very good, but when things are bad, they are rotten! 
  • I have unsuccessfully tried to leave the United States of America for the last two days. My baggage has already left the country, but despite cloud architecture, big data, enterprise resource planning systems, logistical control systems, the Internet, the intranet, search engines, robots, CCTV, and all the technology at the disposal of this great country, we are unable to establish exactly where my bags are at this moment!

You have to be really “analogue” to remember this, but there was a time when we used to take little plastic canisters of film to a studio and pay for them to be converted into shiny square pictures (photos) which we pasted into albums and showed all our friends.

We still show photos to all our friends but only after uploading them from our multifunctional phones onto some social media site. In a nutshell, this is development!

Reminiscing about this reminded me that “development” is a “two steps forward, three steps back” kind of affair.

This is usually evident in developed countries where when things are good they are very, very good, but when things are bad, they are rotten! 

I am writing this at an airport lounge. I have unsuccessfully tried to leave the United States of America for the last two days. My baggage has already left the country, but despite cloud architecture, big data, enterprise resource planning systems, logistical control systems, the Internet, the intranet, search engines, robots, CCTV, and all the technology at the disposal of this great country, we are unable to establish exactly where my bags are at this moment!

TWEETING IN TONGUES

Yesterday I had to disembark from my American Airways flight because a delay caused me to miss my connecting flight. And since I did not have a transit visa, had I proceeded on that flight the airline would have been fined $5,000 (Sh439,250) and I would have been kept in an immigration cage until there was a flight to take me to Kenya.

I was informed that my baggage had also been offloaded but it took a 90-minute wait in a baggage service queue to discover that, on the contrary, since my baggage is used to free travel without visas, it was merrily on its way to the United Kingdom.

The baggage service queue was made up of people tweeting to each other in multiple tongues including Spanish, Russian and Fijian. Most of the bags had huge holes (in hard-sided cases) or rips, in fabric cases.

The bags looked more as if they had been on the losing end of a wrestling match than as if they had been gently transferred on and off an aircraft.

Despite the long queue and the desperate cases there was only one staff member on duty and therefore each succeeding client first related their own trials and tribulations before displaying their injured bag for all to see.

One sign of development is that no one wants to give a human being a job, because that is too expensive.

Therefore, the hardest thing to find here is a human being to help you (unless you need a policeman, in which case there are plenty.)

The other ubiquitous property of development (and in my case, this is poetic justice) is the authoritarian computer.

There isn’t enough space to tell you about all the times I came up against a computer that arrogantly controls people and processes without leg room for deviation, but this is what happened when the airline finally transported me to a hotel...

RIGID COMPUTERS

Receptionist: Ma’am, are you from American Airlines? But they didn’t call first to let us know you were coming!

Me: I have a voucher. Do you have a room?

Receptionist: Yes, but it doesn’t matter, the computer requires that they call first.

Me: It is almost two in the morning, is there a way to quickly sort this out and let me rest.

Receptionist: Ma’am, I can’t bypass the computer. I will call the airline so that they can call back and reserve by phone.

Me: Trust me, I have been trying for the last three hours, there is no one there to answer your call... 

You don’t want to hear the rest of this conversation, but we did finally manage to bypass this particular rigid computer. 

This Saturday let’s have a little less of the “big data” and a little more of the “big service.”