Can paper really spoil?

My friend Seth tried to get his motorcycle registered at the DMV this week. From the license agency, he sent me the following text message: "I spent 3 and a half hours at DVLA today trying register the moto only to find out that form C was finished and I had spoiled form A so I won’t be able to drive by today."

Let me translate. You probably get the jist of the message, but it is the wording of the message that is purely Ghanaian. When something here spoils, it is ruined, or won’t work. Whatever Seth had filled out on form A of his application, they were telling him that it was incorrect. The phrasing of form C being finished is the way that Ghanaians would say that they have run out of that particular form. At restaurants, if a particular dish is finished, then they don’t have any more for that night. So, in other words, the DVLA was telling Seth that he had screwed up one form of the application, and that he couldn’t fill out the other one.

It is also very Ghanaian for him to not find out this information until after he had spent 3 ½ hours of his time trying to register the motorcycle. So many times, rather than telling you something straight away and not wasting your time, Ghanaians prefer to never tell you no directly. This can lead to many frustrating experiences, as you usually have to figure out on your own that your objective will go unfulfilled for that day. But it’s not a cultural norm for someone to tell you no. This leads to us Westerners learning to be much more direct and precise in the questions that we ask. For example, my favorite Ghanaianism is the phrase "I am coming." This can mean that they will arrive anytime between 10 minutes and 3 days. But if you really want to know when someone will actually meet up with you, you then have to become a phone interrogator, and ask questions like, "Where exactly are you?, When did you leave?, Are you coming straight here? How are you traveling?, etc…" Only then will you get a clear picture of how long it will be until your friend will arrive. I imagine we all know people with these behavioral tendencies in the US, but here it is the norm.