"A gang that included an army general and a senior police officer had a sideline as loan sharks in addition to extorting 50 million baht from their victims, police say," a paragraph from the Aug 12 online news story, "Extortionists in uniform were also loan sharks" says.
Now, why am I not all excited over this story? Instead I'm reading it with a ho-hum attitude. It was all somehow expected. There is an American expression: In for a dime, in for a dollar. What's the difference. Go for broke, you only burn once. It's far easier to jail mushroom pickers.
Thieving Magpie
Criminal treatment
Despite the recent clamour over long waits at airport immigration, it needs to be said that you don't have to be a recent arrival to get "immigration anxiety". Although I have been married to a Thai citizen for almost 27 years and my only abode in the world has been here in Thailand, I will be going through the same process in a couple of months time as I did back in 1991, only it will necessitate an even greater pile of documents than it did then.
The official form that accompanies these copies is called "application for extension of a temporary stay in the kingdom", a strange description for a 27-year sojourn, and my application has to be made in Chiang Mai with my wife in attendance.
Living as I do on the northern border of the province I have a 200-km journey to get to an office for which applicants are known to be queueing at 2am in the morning to get an official number to be able to see an officer that day.
We will have had a four-hour drive, my wife will be anxious and nervous as always on sight of official uniforms and our ordeal could easily stretch two or three days. We will provide all the copies of the same forms we did last year, the only item changing being a copy of my bank statement showing I have the funds necessary.
I have no criminal record in either the UK or Thailand but feel that this treatment is something that perhaps a paedophile or mass murderer should undergo but not a decent law abiding person. In our computer age, can this really be described as necessary and the best Thailand can do for the father of a young man who volunteered for military conscription?
Lungstib
Tha Ton
Man the counters
A comment on the analysis report in the Business Section on Aug 15 is spot on: "It's a rare sight when all the immigration counters at Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang are fully manned." Put simply, that is the root cause of the long delays in processing arrivals. Not the TM6 cards!
Colin Rose
Learn from neighbours
I just travelled to Vietnam and took careful note of their immigration processing of foreign tourists. Average time for officers to process each Asean visitor: 16 seconds. Average time to process other foreign visitors: 28 seconds. Maximum waiting time visitors spent in line waiting to be processed (despite multiple flights arriving at nearly the same time): 15 minutes. Number of arrival documents incoming tourists required to complete: zero.
If Vietnam can do it this efficiently, why not Thailand?
Samanea Saman
Best of the worst
Yessiree, Ron Grierson, "Thailand sucks" (PostBag, August 14) is a new catchphrase among the expat community here. But most of us use it affectionately. Those of us who have been here a long time are still here, whether or not the airport lines are too long, the public transit is screwed up, whether we like the 90-day registration or the other stones that immigration tosses into our paths now and then. We put up with dirty beaches, polluted water for swimming, corruption, being overcharged, and more.
However, Thailand sucks, and believe me, it does suck at times, Canada sucks more, the USA sucks the worst, and all those other places we have gravitated from suck in between. There used to be a cartoon entitled, "Grin and bear it", for those of us who might remember. There's also that wonderful World War 1 marching song, "Pack up your troubles in an old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile," when you feel it all getting to you.
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