Oh, Canada!

Every once in a while, ya just gotta vent! Apologies in advance for the rambling... this has taken so many trips through draft, I may well have edited all the sense out of it..

In the month of October, I shipped 10 books from San Francisco to Canada. As of late November/early December, five (5!) of those packages have not yet arrived to my customers. Given past experience, the chances are very good that the items are presently in some Customs station backwater, patiently awaiting whatever bureaucratic voodoo they do. There is essentially nothing I (or my customers) can do about it. Oh sure, we can inquire,Customs Form number from the package meekly in hand, and hope that the package will shake loose, but I suspect our efforts are like pressing the 'close door' button on the elevator... It may make us feel like we are doing something but the door will close when it closes...

From a distance, I don't really have any right to speculate but I will anyway... like pushing that (other) button to get the light to change so I can cross the street, it just gives me the feeling that I am doing something. Nothing's going to change but somehow, the rambling helps. So here's my theory:

A long time ago, in a customs office far far way, a particularly difficult and distrustful person was placed in a position of  tremendous authority. And that person's attitude (as bad attitude's have a tendency to do) began to seep into every corner of the organization...Now, there seems to be an institutional predisposition towards confrontation and distrust in any dealings involving the Canadian Customs. From what I hear, that includes the interactions between their Labor and Management as well.

You can see how it can spread. As an employee in such an environment,  you'd have to sail with the prevailing wind just to survive the day without going crazy.

It's important to remember that I'm not saying this is peculiar to Candian Customs. We've all (no matter what country we are from) encountered particularly difficult people... They seem to be especially prevalent in bureaucracies (though I've seen enough of them in non- governmental bureaucracy environments to know that they can exist anywhere). It is easy, standing in line or desperately trying to shake a package loose from customs, to imagine these folks as somehow less than human, a Kafka-esque breed of functionaries placed on this planet to make the lives of the rest of us miserable. But this would be wrong. They are human beings. They've been turned into confrontational drones by their work environment... I actually feel sorry for them. Can you imagine going in to work every day to an environment where confrontation is the norm?

So what can be done... Each time I respond to a customer, I have to fight the desire to imply that theft is involved... I suspect it is NOT but at some level, I have the feeling that spreading the rumor that it IS would ultimately get some action. But the problem with this 'solution' is that it perpetuates the confrontational dynamic. And nothing good can come from that in the long term.

No, I'm afraid that the only long-term solution is an attitude adjustment, a most difficult thing to pull off on the organizational level. It will take a couple of quality people in positions of power to slowly change the attitude. Will it happen? I doubt it. But here's hoping that at some point down the road, my Canadian customers have at least a tolerable chance of receive their packages in a reasonable amount of time.

-Joe