Dear Editor,
There are so many “big” things happening nowadays that you learn to take them, as it were, in your stride. Another robbery, another shooting, another murder, another home invasion, ho-hum! However, human nature being what it is, you start to pay attention to the ‘little’ things and, to use a Guyanese expression; you start to take them on.
Let me give you a few examples of these little things.
1. You go to pay a bill of say $12,000 in cash (cheques are still not as acceptable as they should be).
After an eternity in the line, you hand over your money to the cashier who immediately starts ordering your bills. What do I mean? Assuming the first bill is ‘correct’ – for example, it has the map of Guyana facing forward – , All the others must be aligned the same way and so he/she proceeds to turn every out-of-order bill 180°, 360°, or even a complete back or forward flip. Of course, the cashier is in the comfort of a padded or upholstered chair but, having been on your elderly feet for 45 minutes, every second means something to you.
2. You go to make a deposit in this particular bank (I can only speak of the bank where I have an account) and dutifully and correctly put the date of the deposit as, say, 1st February, 2010. The cashier draws a line through the date you wrote and rewrites the same date another way requesting your signature at the correction/change advising that the format you used for writing the date was not the format the bank was using! I have a resolve for the next time this happens.
3. You go to pay your car insurance premium at a certain insurance company. The operation seems quite modern (the cashier even does the same alignment thing with your notes) until you hear the whistle and whine of the old dot-matrix printer as your receipt is laboriously being printed.
4. Finally, there is the idiot (this is the kindest word I can use that will be printed) who is 5 or 6 cars from the front in a line at a traffic light and who sounds his horn (we Guyanese say ‘blows his horn’. I wonder why?) As soon as the light changes! There is a ‘fly over’ sign you can use in response!
As the old ballad says (though not in the same context), “Little things (can) mean a lot.”
Yours faithfully,
C.E. Housty
