Dear Editor,
The visiting young researcher boldly asserted how disappointed he was when I admitted not knowing what was the job content of a Typist Clerk (without a hyphen) – a position which proliferates throughout Guyana’s Public Service. Apparently, it was recommended to him that I was old enough to know.
I strove to explain that when in my youthful Colonial days both Public and Private Sectors organisations employed Typists and Secretaries (all female) who were formally trained to ‘take dictation’, as well as accept manuscripts which they would reproduce using a ‘typewriter’. So far as I know, in those days ‘clerks’ worked mostly in the Accounts/Finance Departments, and without ‘typewriters’, which in any case they knew nothing about.
In these days however, I could not assure the interviewer of the specific ‘gender of a Typist Clerk’. Still expectant, he proffered: ‘then I suppose you should enquire of the Human Resources Department’! To which I rejoined “If you can find it.’ So far as I recall, throughout this Public Service there are the following: Personnel Officer 1, Personnel Officer 11, Senior Personnel Officer, Principal Personnel Officer, and the rare Chief Personnel Officer; and if I may add there is the interesting coincidence of the “Typist’ and the ‘Personnel Officer’ existing from since the Colonial Era?
It just goes to show that we are a most singularly modern administration. Hesitantly, my young friend retorted: foreign employers (and even employees) must be quite puzzled. Join the chorus!
Sincerely,
E. B. John
