Opinion: Human Resource Officers Need to Carefully Dispose Off Our Documents When We Fail to Get Jobs

You thought being dumped by your ex-boyfriend was the most hurting thing, or as the ladies you think menstrual cramp pains are the realest pains! Well, you were wrong. How about landing on copies of your transcripts, certificates and other academic documents being used to wrap gonja in Banda? Do you know how painful and heartbreaking that is? You feel heartbroken because it’s like you are being shortlisted for a gonja or rolex selling business. If you have never come across such social media posts such as;

“Tell Nakato Lydia who applied for a job at Post Bank that I am here eating rolex wrapped with her transcript”, you surely haven’t witnessed that pain.

Worse still, you might find your transcripts photocopies and copies of your academic certificates being used to wipe bottoms by funny chaps who don’t know that toilet paper is an essential at campus. Jokes aside, who really takes these copies of academic documents to these gonja and rolex vendors?

A one, Brenda Katusiime, an alumna of Ndejje University recently found her certificates being used to wrap kikomanda in Kinawataka. Campus Bee is still puzzled at who really makes these papers vulnerable to being used on streets.

“I recently applied to a job at a certain ministry, they didn’t shortlist me as a successful candidate though but I was surprised to buy kikomando in the neighborhood with my certificate as the wrapping paper”, Brenda Katusiime said in an interview.

She continues to add that it’s probably the human resource managers of these companies who are reckless at dumping these trashed copies of certificates and transcripts of applicants for a job after they have not been successful. It is also evident that, some managers sell off these ‘unwanted papers’ to rubbish collectors who later turn them into wrapping bags and papers for rolex, kikomando and chappatis.

The blame not only goes to HRs of companies but also to students to some extent. From a stationery or photocopying machine, some don’t even bother to collect all the badly printed papers or the excess copies of their academic documents. Arnold Mukasa, a stationery business owner at Nakawa laments that some students are just lazy and careless.

“You photocopy documents for a student, they only pick a few and leave the ones they don’t want. What do we do, we dump or sell them off to waste collectors who use them for their own benefit”, he says.

It is now clear and should be put as common knowledge to collect every copy even badly printed paper balance of your academic documents once you are out of the stationery shop. Although it might seem hard to bring careless human resource managers to book, there should be a binding law that governs dumping of paper refuse as wastes because some of these papers actually contain vital information that could be useful to another person.

If it were possible to specifically use old newspapers, magazines to wrap these commodities we buy, campusers who are mostly job seekers would be safer. Although it should remain the responsibility of each person to guard and keep his or her academic documents safe, fighting the tendencies of chapatti vendors using academic documents of students as wrapping bags for their commodities is a fight that is far from ending.