Carisa Lee

Cus­tomers who vis­it­ed the Ch­agua­nas and Wright­son Road Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board of­fices yes­ter­day may have been un­able to com­plete their trans­ac­tions.

Those in line, some from as ear­ly as 5 am, were still wait­ing to be at­tend­ed to when Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the branch­es at mid­day.

Eu­ryl Hous­ing vis­it­ed the NIB of­fice in Ch­agua­nas to sub­mit a claim but just be­fore mid­day day she gave up wait­ing and went home.

“It’s a poor sit­u­a­tion…me ain’t get through so I go­ing home,” she said.

Hous­ing said she took a day off to make the sub­mis­sion and now she is afraid when she gets off again her claim would be in­valid.

Al­so wait­ing in line was Steve De­onar­ine who said he usu­al­ly goes to the of­fice in Cou­va but was in the area and de­cid­ed to get his trans­ac­tion done at the Ch­agua­nas of­fice. But af­ter wait­ing for ap­prox­i­mate­ly five hours he too left. He said no one came out to com­mu­ni­cate with those stand­ing in line about what caused the wait.

“The time out that the of­fice at­tend­ing to the cus­tomer there is like see­ing a per­son for 45 min­utes plus,” De­onar­ine said.

“Peo­ple are get­ting frus­trat­ed and sick. Noth­ing go­ing down and they not telling you what go­ing down,” he con­tin­ued.

De­onar­ine told Guardian Me­dia that no one came out to en­sure they so­cial­ly dis­tanced in the line. He said there is nowhere for peo­ple to sit while wait­ing out­side or nowhere to shel­ter from the rain.

Members of the public wait in line outdise the NIB branch on Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain yesterday.

ABRAHA DIAZ

“Is (sic) a dis­as­ter,” he said.

“They us­ing the sick­ness to cov­er up every­thing and peo­ple suf­fer­ing out here,” he con­tin­ued.

Win­ston Gar­cia has been back and forth at Ch­agua­nas Of­fice since last week. He said he has been try­ing to sub­mit his NIS form, but his at­tempts were un­suc­cess­ful.

“This ain’t nice at all be­cause is a set of old peo­ple here...a la­dy fall down here last week in front of me, well they hus­tle and put she in­side like you have to fall down here to go in­side,” he said.

Gar­cia was leav­ing when he made the com­ment, say­ing he could not wait any longer.

In a state­ment to the me­dia, the NIB said to re­duce the wait and make it eas­i­er for cus­tomers to do busi­ness dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, it im­ple­ment­ed an ap­point­ment sys­tem for cus­tomers pro­cess­ing claims. The NIB said this will re­duce the num­ber of peo­ple vis­it­ing its of­fices.

But some peo­ple in the line said it would be dif­fi­cult for them to use this new on­line sys­tem, they said they were told about it and giv­en a piece of pa­per with the in­for­ma­tion but that was all.

“Come out and ex­plain to the peo­ple and them, have a lil two mins talk with them,” he said.

“Please make an ap­point­ment, dot com this that and all kind of thing,” De­onar­ine read.