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Handwriting and the post office

POS MALAYSIA BERHAD IS, like Malaysian government-linked companies, on the rip-off trail. It has peculiar notion why it is around. It is not to serve the public or provide a service, but to make money for its senior executives and, if there is enough change left, for the postal service. The first step is to computerise its operations, done not to make it easier to deal with those who use it, but as a religious offering in the temple of computerisation and modernisation. So it would stop any but the most determined, the contract is usually given to an Umno-based conglomerate of well-connected near-bankrupts with doubtful credentials and supervised by well-connected politicians of similar intelligence and reach. Their aim is profit for little or no work, and hand it down to the lowest bidder for a system that in due course would not work.

The mess in Plus Highway, Telekom, Tenaga Nasional Berhad, Pos Malaysia Berhad, Putrajaya, the supremely inefficient public transport system reflect it. The list is endless, so the woes and frustrations of those who use these services.

Pos Malaysia has computerised its mail services, and "rationalised" the postal rates. It has explained the new rates in a leaflet, "Reclassification of Mail Products", so obtusely written in gobbledygook that its tortuous bureaucratic passages need an experienced English tutor to translate. English is one of two languages I am fluent, and speak, read and write, in. But I can only guess what it is about. These new rates are pushed on an unsuspecting public at the last possible moment, two weeks before it came into force on March 1. There are vague statements over the years of the changes to come, but none nearer the date, and no explanations whatever of what the changes entail.

I have at times enquired at the enquiry counter at the General Post Office in Kuala Lumpur and at the Brickfields and Bangsar post offices. All I got were confused answers which often contradicted each other. But an announcement is seen as proof that all knew about. Look at the mess surrounding the illegal workers: it is not unusual, and is around at every government plan.

I found out this week what the new rates meant in practice. If I continued to address the envelopes by hand – as I did on half a dozen this week – I must pay a 40 per cent surcharge in postage stamps; I had to paste a 50 sen stamp instead of the usual 30 sen.

Why? "It is not standard mail," says the Pos Malaysia Berhad leaflet. What is "standard" mail? In brief, it is a white envelope of a standard size that can be read by a postal addressing sorting machine. These sorting machines cannot read handwriting, so handwritten envelopes are not "standard" mail, and charged extra.

Automated sorting machines

Why is "standard mail" so important to postal services? Because a mail sorting machine can sort up to 40,000 mail an hour, as against 1,500 manually. More important, Pos Malaysia Berhad is spending RM200 million in the automated sorting machines. So that should not go to waste – it would anyway for other reasons, but that is another story – the public must fit into Pos Malaysia Berhad's ill-thought automation programme but why was a new untested system commissioned when the existing one was running below capacity and had still 15 years of its life left?

This is not new. Where once the administration was the servant of the people, it is the people who are servants of the administration. The conventions of computerisation coupled with the power that gives the operator over the man-in-the-street, and the inherent superiority the civil and public servant has for the man-in-the-street makes this transition easier. In the gentler, older and old fashioned notions of service, the civil servant went out of his way to address the concerns of the public, replying courteously to even the most uncouth and boorish of complainers. It is a rare exception to find civil or public servants of this temperament now.

As computerisation took over, the old standards of courtesy and civil and civic behaviour were thrown overboard. Standard form letters for all occasions now reply to individual queries. An attempt to get further particulars on the telephone causes more agony as a computerised voice machine takes your on a wild goose chase, and when the right department or person is reached, you are told to hang on because the line is busy. Just call a government department, or these, many a public company, and you will know what I mean. The lowest bidding for the negotiated high price of the contract reveals itself in all its glory.

A new culture is in force. When personal computers came to be widely used, programmes were on hand to keep the man-in-the-street ignorant. I attempted for years to get redress, through the Prime Minister's Public Complaints Bureau, a complaint about official highhandedness. In about 1997, ten years after I began my quest, I had to give up in frustration. Every request to the PCB is personal to the officer in charge. So, I found myself going to different offices of the bureau all over Kuala Lumpur as the officer originally in charge moved up the civil service ladder. But each visit to find out is an obstacle course, wasting hours in waiting rooms before being told that the officer is not free to attend to me on the date and time he had specified or that he is in a meeting from which he cannot be disturbed. I must have given out at least half a dozen sets of the complaints and letters, as often when an officer attended to me, the files went missing.

When the officer retired, no doubt with full honours, I decided it was time to let go. But it left one embittered man, in his 60s, who will go to his grave cursing the government for not addressing his justified complaint. Multiply that by a few tens of thousands of times, and the government in power has a ready made group of people who could well one day turn them out into the opposition. When this is the norm in every government, public services and GLCs, their fear of the people is all too justified. So they have to kept on a tight leash.

Letters and post cards are how people keep in touch, now that travel is beyond the reach of many Malaysians. It costs more in tolls than petrol to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Penang or Johore. With the cost of travel escalating, even a bus journey is beyond many. Pos Malaysia Berhad should have looked at this social phenomena when it computerised its operations. And realised most people write their letters, and address it by hand. Whatever the computer programme says, what he writes is standard mail. It is how most people write. It is often the only link they have with the outside world. Unless of course, this is deliberate: to collect more by charging more for handwritten addresses.

‘We should not complain’

Almost all my letters are written in an Italic hand – though based on the flowing chancery hand primer of the Papal scriptist Ludovic Arrighi in the 16th century, were he alive today he would well scoff at my adaptation of his hand; I have written it for 45 years, at speed and since I never learnt shorthand, to take notes at press conferences and interviews – and naturally I address all envelopes by hand, besides writing most of my letters in my italic hand. Besides it is far more legible than the chicken-scratch scribble it replaced in 1959. My other workhorse is my Apple eMac computer, and adjusting it for the occasional writing of addresses on envelopes is too daunting, and wasteful, to undertake.

I am now told I must pay a price for refusing to fall in line with Pos Malaysia's flawed computerisation plans. One need not wonder why letter writers in other countries which have modernised their postal delivery systems are treated with respect. In Singapore, for instance. But the island republic wants to be part of the global network. How they go about it can be, and is, challenged. But that comes not from those who have to use the system: they are pleased with it. For all its plans, in Malaysia, the standards of service is abysmal, as in every area, in private and public companies, in government, public authorities and GLCs. We are all told we must be digits in a computerised world. We should not complain. We should not question what is asked of us.

What would I do? For one, I have got in the habit of sending letters with friends who travel, which I did in my days as a foreign correspondent often to bypass the country's censors. It is sure to get there, which I cannot say of the postal services here.

A friend in Penang has no faith in the postal services. He sent me a book, but not through the post. A friend coming to Kuala Lumpur delivered it. I have on occasion used taxis and buses to deliver letters and parcels. The bureaucracy in the postal services is too daunting and time consuming for an old man to fight back. But if this madness persist, perhaps my handwritten letters would reach the recipient by other than the postal services. Am I a voice in the wilderness? I am not sure.

[This is my Chiaroscuro column in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) today, 17 March 2005.]