Out of order

At the height of the pandemic lockdown, I bought a turntable to both play and to digitise old vinyl records that lay languishing in boxes in my cupboard.

Sadly, while the experience brought much joy, it also reminded me why some of us still describe mostly irritating, repetitive admonitions as being akin to experiencing a “stuck record.”

My digital native musician son had, of course, known the idiom, but acquired first-hand knowledge of it while we played the Mighty Shadow’s ‘Keep On Dancin’ – gifted to my late father by the calypso genius himself in 1991 but which was not very well preserved.

Being like a “stuck record” signals a defect – accumulated dust or grime or, worse, a terminal crack or scratch. Used as an extended metaphor, though, it can point to the necessity of repeated mention of a recurring offensive/negative act or condition.

All of this is to blunt retorts to my insistence on reminding people that the digital era has long been upon us. And even as a child of the analogue generation, I am committed to the unprecedented advantages of the current period, despite our seemingly collective refusal to grasp them.

Almost every week I have been finding space to mention, either in passing or substantively, that our country is missing the point of all of this and as a consequence the situation remains, in important areas of private and public life, chronically damaged, unfixed, or simply “out of order.”

For instance, it did not appear to bother many that for more than a week, the government’s ttconnect service, “the easy road to access info on All Government Services” remained, without explanation or apology, “out of order.”

Some smarty-pants is going to suggest that only “some” services were unavailable, and that it was still possible to stand in line under cloudy skies on the street to transact business with slothful government agencies.

Well, why the fuss? Among the key functions of the service, is to make life easier for people interested in conducting their tax affairs online while optimising the prospects for more efficient collection of taxes … which fuel the economy and keep things rolling by also paying the people responsible for keeping ttconnect functional!

Monday’s delayed apology from ttconnect included typically vague tech gobbledygook that’s, at minimum, disrespectful to those even with half-knowledge of how these things work. “Be assured, our technical teams have been working tirelessly to restore the portal’s accessibility and the NORMALNESS it provides.”

There was no indication of resolution time, or what precisely this “normalness” means. People who know about such stuff would tell you that for something as important as this, durable redundancies and rigorous implementation plans are expected to be par for the course.

As appalling as it is, this is not a unique or narrow national experience. There appears to be a high level of cognitive dissonance each time both public and private sector bosses are called upon to employ digital solutions to make life easier for clients/citizens. It calls for enlightened recognition of both processes and outcomes.

Digital vaccine cards were conceived, bungled and expired in one seamless flight of fancy spanning months and months.

Meanwhile, glitzy digital entry points almost routinely lead to bureaucratic mazes occupied by paper, signatures, office visits, more paper, parking spaces, frustration, “photocopies available across the street”, “download, print, sign, scan and email.”

The digital facades are everywhere in the private sector too. Now that strict pandemic measures are being lifted, processes that furtively approached digital terrain are now retreating to the “normalness” we appear to love.

Where, in banking, insurance, retail is there real evidence of a commitment to embrace digital opportunity following a period when it remained, in many instances, the sole path?

Many chosen options at that time now lie haplessly “out of order.” In a society where so many things are in need of repair and so much is left undone or incomplete, this is an irresistible descriptor of our resistance to the tools of modernity.

Moving from “Driver’s Permit” to “Driver’s Licence”, for example, is not among even the least evident indications of digitally driven change. That it can be shamelessly promoted as such by a government ministry for which “out of order” is the norm speaks volumes.

Absolutely no apologies, therefore, for being a stuck record on this. Or am I being out of order?