Post Facto

It is interesting to see how certain communications in governmental and corporation work are post facto. I received a letter from a government office yesterday. It was addressed to my late father, who passed away 24 years ago. I wrote to the sender about the sad demise of my father and requested him not to communicate with me again. Though 24 years have passed, it still hurts when I think of his untimely death. But the government machinery does not care. It sends out letters based on records as old as 24 years. The point of interest was that it was dated 17 days ago, and wanted me to respond to it within 15 days of the date on the letter, not even the day of receipt. Perhaps we can put that down to inefficiency of people who write those letters, who sign those much later, and others who post those even later. There are deliberate post facto communications too. We see them when we receive notices to attend meetings that have already taken place. Such communications are sent to those who need to be invited to attend, but are not wanted for various reasons. These post facto invitees can rage and thunder, but cannot claim that they were not invited. In fact, it may even be recorded in the minutes of the said meetings that these invitees were absent. That is important when inviters want to make certain decisions without resistance from those who are opposed to those decisions. There are advertisements for posts at the hospital which are to be given only to local candidates. These are placed on the notice boards late evening of the day before the last day for submission of applications. Copies of the advertisement are sent to other institutes after the last date, so that candidates from those institutes cannot attend. I feel strongly about such maneuvers. They had done that to me when I was top of my class, but they did not want me to compete with their local candidates. I did not know about the interviews for the tutors’ posts until after the appointments of those local candidates. I beat them in subsequent lecturers’ post interviews, but that is besides the point. It still hurts that the administrators maneuvered so as to suppress merit.