Royal Fail
Delighted to hear that Post Office workers have achieved riches beyond their wildest dreams in their latest pay settlement.
Sadly they seem to have been celebrating too long and too hard both before and after the award.
A woman rang me to ask why I hadn’t responded to a £1,200 cheque she sent me late last week. Reason: I never received it.
That set me wondering why a colleague hadn’t cashed two large cheques I’d sent her in January and February. So I rang her, and she’d not received either of them. One of them was posted in London, and the other in Harlech. So it’s not just a local problem.
We were in Harlech last week when Von suddenly remembered she’d forgotten to bring three DVDs she wanted to watch. So we rang our London office and the 3 DVDs were posted to us first class on the Monday morning.
They didn’t arrive.
Five days later I discovered there was another house called Murmur-y-Don in Harlech (how DARE they!), albeit with differently named people living there, and a different postcode. So I went to visit. There were our DVDs, clearly and correctly addressed, delivered by the Royal Mail (sorry, Post Brenhinol in Wales) to the wrong people at the wrong post code.
Does the postcode actually mean anything? The doorbell rang this morning in London and before the postman had time to stuff a “Sorry you were out” notice through the door I whipped the door open and snatched the parcel from his hands. He’d put the rest of the post through the letterbox, so I rapidly sorted through it, removed the letters addressed to 22 Albany Road (with a different postcode) and 22 Mount Pleasant Villas (with a different postcode), rushed next door and handed them back to the surprised postie. At least he got the 22 right.
I usually miss postie, so I have to stick the wrongly delivered letters back in the postbox and hope they get it right the second time around. We get sent credit cards, bank statements and God knows what else intended for other people. I’m amazed we get any of our post at all. Now I’m finding the post that we are paying for and sending are simply not getting to their destinations.
Why has it got so bad? Is it Adam Crozier’s fault? Is it a general malaise? When I was a child I once sent myself a letter addressed to “HEADLEY HARLECH” with nothing else (except a tuppenny ha’penny stamp) on the envelope at all. I posted in in Hertfordshire and it was delivered to the house the following day.
All I know is that I’m going to start asking people to pay me by bank transfer in the future. And the Post Office will lose a little bit more of its revenue.
But if I want to send someone in say Switzerland £20, the bank will charge me £20 for the privilege. Much better to pop a £20 note into the post. But will it get there? Or do sorting offices now have sophisticated envelope-sniffing machines which will spot hard currency and deftly relieve the PO from the burden of having to deliver the letter?
We never know until we’re told.
