People and noise

Communication Culture – Letters

It is often said that the art of letter writing is dead, though presumably never by Peruvians. Here letter writing is either very much alive, or a virulent plague of zombie letters have taken over the county, tearing chunks out of other forms of communication and eating the peoples’ brains.

In this country the power of the letter is so great that I don’t think I’ll be able to cover the subject in a single blog post. To give you a taste, however, here are a couple of examples.

We are based in a complex shared by a few organisations, and one has an meeting room which it hires out to the others for free. In order to book it, you have to go through the following process:

1. Walk to their office and ask if the room is free at the required time. If it is…
2. They’ll ask you to write a letter to confirm the booking
3. Return to the office and compose an absurdly formal request letter
4. Ensure that the letter is correctly formatted with the heading, logo etc of your organisation, and the mandatory phrase of that year that heads every letter, as dictated by the Peruvian government (I’ll come back to this on another occasion)
5. Print two copies. Stamp one with a stamp saying “Cargo”
6. Get someone of sufficient status to authorise both copies by signing and stamping them
7. Take them back to the other organisation’s office where they will sign, stamp and date both copies to prove they have received them
8. They keep one copy, you keep the other. I presume this is because organisations/people don’t trust each other, and therefore when someone doesn’t do what they said they did, you can wave a copy of their signed, stamped, dated agreement under their nose and go “Look! Proof!” (though where this gets you I’m not quite sure)
9. They will then craft an absurdly formal letter to confirm your booking, printing two copies and giving them to the director of their organisation to sign and stamp
10. Someone will bring these to your office for you to sign and stamp, thus confirming your reservation of a freely available room.

Congratulations. You have successfully booked a room with an organisation one minutes walk from your door. Who could believe it could be so simple?

This, however, is the way things are done. A while ago I was asked to run a couple of workshops by a colleague who sits at the same desk as me pretty much every day. I said that was fine, approved the timetable and assumed therefore that everything was confirmed.

The next day our secretary handed me six letters signed by the president of the federation presenting the week of training. On reading them I saw they were two separate invitations to run each session I’d agreed to, printed in triplicate for me to sign and date, in order that there was a copy for my records and one for those of the federation and my colleague. I turned and asked her (she was still sitting at the same desk) whether this was really necessary.

“I’ve done it for each of the trainers,” she said (and this included at least one other person sitting in the same office).

“I wanted to do things properly.”

In Peru, the letter is still king, and if you haven’t communicated something on a printed piece of paper, stamped, signed and dated with a copy for your records, well maybe, just maybe, you haven’t communicated it at all.

Incidentally, neither of my sessions took place at the time, or indeed on the day, stated on their respective letters.

1 Comment »

1. 

   Ahhh, but step 1 isn’t even part of the formal process. What you should really do is send the letters and wait for the reply to know if the room is free, and keep sending the letters and waiting for replies until you chance upon a free day….

   Comment by helen todd — December 1, 2009 @ 12:44 pm

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