When you are waiting for an important letter to arrive, your ears betray you, and you are actually hearing the postman slipping letters into your postbox. And you do not realize the postman did not arrive until you go to your postbox, how many times a day? Three, four, ten?
And when your short term future depends on that delivery, you start wondering where could it be? Had they already sent it? The same feeling as when you are starving and waiting for the rice to be cooked, expecting to get your letter takes forever.
You get your degree at the opposite side of the world, good; your examination marks are published, good; you come back without your subject results because your official records need to be signed and mailed to your postal address to both you and your University ,good”. And as days, weeks and months go by, the application deadline for the master degree comes closer, not so good; you narrow your search for Universities, registration is full, ” we need your academic degree”…not so good … Summer is almost over, your postbox glares at you grinning from ear to ear.
This is when in your mind’s eyes you see your academic degree landing in Japan, Sri Lanka or in Île de la Réunion. Or even worse… in an orphanage, or inside a bottle tossed in the sea or heartlessly abandoned at whatever corner of any post office in the world.
The summer is definitely over, fall semester classes are about to start and there you are, you and your postbox staring at each other … silence. And all of a sudden, five months later, the postman arrives with your letter and you welcome both of them as you expect Santa on Christmas.
Celebration, fireworks, cheerings … An ode to slowness. And once again, your mind’s eye sees an ideal word, a world where all Universities are using registered electronic communications, simple and faster
We might be done away with the letter odyssey, the anguish and my five months of anxious waiting, don’t we?