I’ll never forget the first time I walked into a Thai government office. It was the tax office on Sukhumvit 11, and I was told to go upstairs to some processing room. I was shocked when it was nothing more than bureaucratic peons sitting amid shoulder-high piles of foolscap paper, bound by plastic rope into thick-ass bundles. There were hundreds of them (piles of paper – there were only a dozen or so peons) and I wondered how the hell anyone managed to recover any data without searching through a mountain of paper first.
Anyway, I’ve seen the same scene over and over again in the years since, and it seems that things aren’t about to change anytime soon. Of course, I don’t expect every Thai government office worker to be sitting in front of a shiny new iMac, and I realize it takes years to modernize the huge backlog of records and data that must exist, but I still found this picture amusing. It was taken at the land registry office on Charoennakorn Road, and I felt like I had somehow walked into Gringotts Bank in a Harry Potter novel.
This poor dude was copying these huge books that people brought up to the counter, where had to make four photocopies of each page to get everything in. 5 pages of the book = 20 pages of paper. God only knows what type of information these books contained, but judging from the tattered pages in the book sitting on the counter, I’m betting it wasn’t new.
“Aaaand that’s Aardvark to ANZAC. Next: Apple.”
Having dealt with these kind of paper filled offices here in India, I must say, it is amazing that they know where everything is.
Hi Arpan, you know what I’m talking about then. Funny story – one time I went to renew my work permit and they needed something from the previous year’s application. I thought it was a lost cause, but the girl disappeared into the back room and came back five minutes later with the exact document she needed. I was shocked, to say the least. 🙂