The document I was never allowed to have

A courier spent nine weeks demanding a certificate that individual importers cannot obtain. On powerlessness, despair, and systems where nobody owns the whole.

The email came in at five past nine on a Monday morning in June. Vietnamese Customs wanted a quality inspection on my parcel, and FedEx would add a charge of sixty-eight dollars and ten cents for it. I replied at seven minutes past. Yes. Go ahead. Charge me.

Two minutes. I felt briefly competent about that, the way you do when a small obstacle turns up and you deal with it before the coffee goes cold.

It is now nine weeks later. The parcel has not moved, except closer to a bin.

What is in it is a Pentax O-GPS2, a piece of equipment so unthreatening it is almost comic. It clips onto the top of a camera and writes the coordinates of a photograph into the photograph. It receives satellite signals and it sends nothing at all. No SIM, no transmitter, no encryption, no means of telling anybody anywhere that it exists. I bought a used one for a hundred and fifty-seven dollars because my medium format camera has no GPS of its own, and I am photographing the Vietnamese landscape while it still looks the way it currently looks. Pentax users around the world swear by it, because of its GPS abilities—it not only tells you where you were, but what direction you were facing when you took the shot. Invaluable information for archivists, I am told.

Aside: And it is for those archives and universities that I am taking these photos, because once the landscape changes—and it will—there will be no way it can ever be recovered. Not the empty hills, not the little houses, not the colours, not the space and atmosphere. All gone. Seen it happen too many times to not want to capture this wonderful country’s landscape and people and buildings before they disappear forever.

Back to the emails… What followed those two minutes went like this. A safety data sheet. Then a battery declaration. Then technical documents. Then the quality inspection I had already agreed to, twice. Then a certificate I would have to obtain myself, at an inspection centre, somewhere. Then a return. Then a commitment letter. Then, five weeks in, an email explaining that the sixty-eight dollars and ten cents had never been an inspection fee at all. It was the shipping.

I want to describe what that does to a person, because the frustration is the obvious part, and the obvious part turns out not to be the interesting one.

The first feeling

Powerlessness, and it had a flavour I had not tasted before I moved here. In Adelaide, when a process went wrong, I knew roughly where the levers were. I could tell the difference between a rule and somebody having a bad morning. In Đà Lạt I cannot. When a requirement arrives, I have no way of knowing whether it is law, policy, custom, error, or one person protecting themselves from a decision they would rather not sign, and no standing to ask which. So you comply. You comply with everything, immediately, because compliance is the only move available to you and because somewhere underneath it you are aware of being a guest.

I asked five separate times, across four weeks, for the name of a manager. Anyone senior to the process. I never received one. The requests went into the same silence every time, and the silence was itself a sort of answer: there is nobody here, keep filling in forms.

There is a specific loneliness in being instructed to do something impossible by someone who cannot be reached to discuss it. Bureaucracy at its worst is not cruel. It simply has nobody home.

The second feeling, which was worse

Despair. I am naming it flatly because I have spent a career asking other men of my generation to do exactly that, and it would be poor form to duck it in my own newsletter. Not metaphorical despair, either. The kind that shows up in your chest and your sleep and your appetite, and that makes a small brown parcel in a warehouse three hundred kilometres away feel like a referendum on whether you belong in the country you have chosen.

I am sixty-seven. I am a counselling psychologist. I can name the mechanism, I have taught the mechanism, and I sat here for two months feeling the mechanism run on me without being able to interrupt it. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, unresolvable demand does specific things to a nervous system, and knowing that in advance offers no protection whatsoever. It is rather like reading the manual aloud while the machine eats your hand.

The literature on helplessness was reorganised about a decade ago, and the reorganisation is the part that matters here. The old story said animals learn to be helpless. The newer reading runs the other way: helplessness is the default state, and what an organism actually learns, when circumstances permit, is that its actions have consequences (Maier & Seligman, 2016, on the neuroscience of learned helplessness). Which means what I was losing over those nine weeks was not my composure. It was something I had spent sixty-seven years acquiring, and it went in about a fortnight.

And then the sentence

This week an email arrived from a regional FedEx office, and it contained one sentence that quietly reorganised everything behind it. The Quality Certification, it said, can only be obtained by a registered company and is not available to individual importers.

I read it twice. I am an individual importer.

So for nine weeks I had been instructed to produce a document that does not exist for people like me. Not difficult to obtain. Not slow. Not expensive. Unavailable. Every deadline I was given, every form I completed, every note in their file describing me as unable or unwilling to provide the paperwork, all of it rested on a requirement that nobody standing where I was standing could ever have satisfied.

Here is what I got wrong, and I got it wrong for two months. I kept asking how to obtain the certificate. Where is the inspection centre, what is the form, what does it cost, who signs it. That was the wrong question the entire time. The question worth asking is why a company can demand something impossible for nine weeks and never once be obliged to notice.

Nobody was obliged to notice, is the answer. The vendor who sold it to me was not obliged to check whether a private individual in Vietnam could legally receive it. The carrier who accepted it into its network was not obliged to check either, and flew it here anyway. The clearance agent who dealt with me week after week could not escalate above himself, because there was no above himself made available to him. Each link was doing its own small job correctly. Not one of them was responsible for the whole, so nobody had to look at the whole, so the only person in the chain who could see the whole picture was the customer, who had the least power of anyone in it. I have written organisational psychology about this for twenty years. I had never been the parcel before.

It is not the first

I have had books by Brian Eno flown into this country and flown out again without ever knowing they had arrived. I found out when Amazon emailed to say they were refunding me. I have had Leibovitz and Salgado sent back to Australia twice, for reasons nobody has ever given me, so that somewhere close to a thousand Australian dollars has now been spent moving art books from my friend Steve’s house in Adelaide to Vietnam and then back to Steve’s house in Adelaide. He is very patient about it. The books are becoming quite well travelled.

I have had the same run-around from a second global carrier, documented on my other site over a dozen posts, which tells me this is not one company having a bad quarter.

Where it sits right now

The universe took thirteen point eight billion years to produce a nervous system capable of abstract reasoning, symphonies, calculus, and the sensation of being personally diminished by a warehouse. Somewhere in Ho Chi Minh City there is a small object designed to record exactly where a photograph was taken, waiting to find out whether it gets to go home or gets put in a bin. It has no opinion on the matter. I have several.

The signed form has gone. The complaint has a case number and has reached people who answer their email in complete sentences, which after two months feels disproportionately moving. Yesterday somebody apologised, and I noticed how much I had wanted that, and how little of what I had actually lost it returned.

I do not have an ending for you. That is the honest position and I would rather report it than tidy it. What I have instead is a small correction to something I used to believe, which is that patience and courtesy and prompt compliance will eventually be met halfway by any system built by human beings. They will not, necessarily. Sometimes there is no halfway, because there is nobody standing on the other side of it.

The coffee, for what it is worth, is excellent here. I wrote most of this in a bistro with new friends at the next table and the light coming in sideways, which is the part of this country the parcel was meant to help me record. I will tell you how it ends when somebody tells me.