Does Your Courier Come Late?

It isn't news that electronic communication technology has become the information transfer paradigm. That obvious fact was reinforced to me when I was asked for my contact information recently and it was only after having provided my personal and business e-mail addresses, my business and home phone numbers, my cell phone number and my fax numbers that it occurred to me as an afterthought to include my street address. In today's world. Unless you play on having someone visit you, providing a physical address is an almost pointless exercise.

But it's important that we not overstate that point; there remain a number of reasons that we may need to employ our physical address beyond the need for a personal visit.

The delivery of products in business requires door-to-door transfer for one physical address to another. Even some information is, by preference, delivered in a physical format; our newspaper and magazines are physically dropped off at our homes and offices. And although business can normally be transacted almost entirely in cyberspace, there remain some things that need to be done in the physical world. While, for example, electronic signatures are becoming more and more accepted, for some purposes an original signature on a document is required; that necessitates the physical delivery of an executed document.

It wasn't so long ago that the postal system was the delivery mechanism of choice. Remember Sherlock Holmes? "This little missive arrived in the morning post, Watson. It seems our new client is to arrive on the two-fourteen at Charing Cross Station. The game is afoot!"

In Victorian England, there were three mail deliveries a day in big cities, allowing someone to write a letter in the morning, knowing it would arrive by noon.

Of course that has all changed. The postal system, even in locales where it is known for its reliability, is largely used for the unimportant, the non time-sensitive, and the insignificant. The junk. If it absolutely, positively must get there, and get there by a certain date or time, other methods are used.

In Jakarta, we use private couriers. We have many suicidal young men with motorcycles who, for a very reasonable fee will take their hands and brave the city traffic to ensure that your announcements, tickets, invitations, manuscript, contracts and confirmations will get to the recipient on time. This is the city's informal courier system. In Western cities like New York and Toronto, These couriers use bicycles and go even faster, I know people who will send a written confirmation of their intention to attend a meeting just as they are getting into the car, they know the confirmation will arrive before they do.

For intercity delivery of letters and small packages there is a variety of courier services to select from, each of which offers a variety of options. Same day, next day, pot luck. Like so many other services in Jakarta, unless you choose one of the brand-name couriers, there is no way to tell how reliable or efficient your choice of carrier will be …you have to rely on word of mouth references from someone you trust. In any case, unless you use a service that is big enough to run its own air cargo service, your precious package could be transported via Adam Air and end up floating on the Sulawesi Sea.

For packages an letters that have to go to foreign destinations, the big courier companies are as reliable in Indonesia as they are anywhere in the world. Any reputable company from Purolator and FedEx to UPS will do the job. It's when Indonesia is on the receiving end that you will occasionally run into problems.

The problem isn't with the companies; it's the usual bureaucratic bottleneck. For get the postal system it you need to take receipt of anything important or valuable. There is no telling when something will arrive, where it will arrive, or in what condition it will arrive, or in what condition it will arrive. It is not at all unusual to find your urgently awaited package, three months late, if you find it at all, in a pile in a back corner of a post office, water damaged, opened and partly resealed with cello-tape, with anything valuable missing.

But the blame does not rest entirely with the postal system. Other bureaucracies are responsible for the delays in receiving packages from abroad. Many businesspeople find themselves waiting for unconscionably long periods of time for overseas shipments to be delivered, not because of transportation delays, but because of the official and unofficial bureaucratic requirements in the ports and at customs.

One of the universities at which I teach encountered a problem in taking delivery of a shipment of textbooks. By coincidence, as a part of a policy of employing world-class business standards, that institution had recently instituted an iron-clad policy of refusing to pay bribes to government officials. In the absence of the port officials being greased, the book were not released for months and we in Indonesia had to make do with substandard teaching materials in one of our universities.

Less serious but bitterly amusing is the way these bottlenecks make Indonesia look to the rest of the world. I write a column for an Indonesian version of a Southeast Asian regional magazines. At the moment the editorial content of the magazines is prepared here in Jakarta but it is printed in Singapore and shipped to Indonesia for national distribution. The magazines of course, is held up in port for the usual reasons and the Indonesian version of an international magazines is only available to subscribers in its own country about a month after it can be found on the stands in Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. Since I have to go to Singapore fairly frequently, I can usually pick up a copy there or on the airplane, weeks before my contributor's copy is delivered to my house…by courier.