The Three Wise Men

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Every few months I would have to drive out to Tripoli International Airport to collect books or other school supplies I had ordered from the UK. As often as not, I would return from these trips empty-handed. This was not usually because the goods hadn't arrived. It was not usually even because I didn't have all the correct paperwork. It was almost always because of problems with what I called the Three Wise Men.

Who were the Three Wise Men? They were three old men who worked in the customs office at the airport. Dressed in traditional Libyan clothes, they sat at a long table and they were responsible for one part of the processing procedure for imported goods. Anyone bringing goods into the country had to start the customs approval process by taking their completed import forms to the old men's table.

The first old man's job was to take the papers and shuffle them until they were in a tidy pile. Then he passed the pile along the table.

The second old man would carefully - and very very slowly - count the papers to make sure you had given in the correct number. He would then pass them along.

The third man was probably the oldest because he had the most important job. He would staple the papers together and then stamp them with the date before handing them back to you.

This all sounds like a well-oiled system. And it was - unless one of the old men was sick. If any one of the Three Wise Men was absent, your papers could not be processed, because neither of the two remaining old men was authorized to stand in for the missing official. So you had to drive back to town and return the following day, hoping that the absent member of the team had recovered and was now at work again. Sometimes he would be there the next day, and sometimes he would still be absent. I remember I once had to make five trips before the team was back up and running smoothly.

Towards the end of my time in Libya, I had a student who was fairly high up in the Libyan Customs Service. In the nicest possible way, I mentioned the Three Wise Men and hinted that it might perhaps be more efficient to replace them with one younger person. A younger man, I suggested, could probably handle the whole process himself - and he would be less likely to be ill and therefore absent.

My student looked puzzled. "But what would we do with the three old men?" he asked.

"You could give them a pension and they could stay home with their families," I said.

"But think of how they would feel," my student replied. "They would feel useless because they would not have a job. If men don't have a job, who respects them? These are very old men and they deserve respect. So we must give them jobs."

"Okay," I answered. "Maybe there is another solution. They could keep their jobs but someone else could step in if one of them was sick."

My student thought about this for a moment.

"No, that would not work," he said. "It would make the old men feel their jobs are not really important and so they are not important."

"But it would make the system much more efficient," I argued. "People like me wouldn't have to keep driving back and forward to the airport."

"True," said my student. "But which is more important - efficiency and your convenience or the feelings of those three old men?"

Maybe I had been in Libya too long by this stage, because I have to admit I was convinced by his argument.