Apathy Sketchpad

On Monday, a small red card appeared in my postbox. It said that the Royal Mail had tried to deliver a package to me but that I wasn’t in (for once they had bothered to press the intercom). A trip to their website later, I got a confirmation saying my item “will be delivered” to the Post Office down the road from my flat for pickup on Wednesday. Great. What a fantastic service.

No. Not really.

On Tuesday I got a second email, saying that in fact they weren’t going to do that.

Dear Mr Taylor

Thank you for requesting redelivery of your item.

I am sorry to inform you that the delivery office cannot take your item to the post office you requested, as it is out of their area/is not able to receive these items.

Please note if your item is a Special Delivery we are only able to redeliver to either the address held on the item or a Post Office that accepts this service.

Please can you re-submit your request for redelivery to your home address free of charge, an alternative address or Post Office within the same postcode area as the original delivery address.

The Post Office we’d originally requested (and they’d “confirmed” it would be delivered to) was technically in a different postcode area to my flat — by what must be all of one hundred yards — and was quite happy to hold onto Mariokart Wii when that was too big for our letterbox, although that was three weeks ago, and that’s a long time in the postal service (unless you go second class).

The email said I needed information from the little red card. This was impossible because my flatmate had picked it up by mistake and I didn’t know where it was. Instead, I phoned them up and explained the problem, and they were happy to redeliver the package to any Post Office I cared to nominate — providing it was in one of two postcode areas chosen apparently at random. Neither one was convenient, but they refused to back down, so I had to make do. They said I could pick it up on Thursday. That’s hardly ideal; it’s now taking four days to get a package from their own delivery office, to their own post office, in the same town. For an organisation whose only function is to move objects around the country, that’s a bit shit. It also raises the question of what would happen if I posted a large package to the Varsity flats in the same building as the Post Office. Presumably they would be willing to redeliver to the flats there for zero pence, but would refuse to accept fifty pence to deliver to their own office on the same street.

I did suggest that they opened the package and post the individual books through the letterbox, as they’d all fit fairly easily, but they said they couldn’t do that either. Apparently there are rules against that.
So yesterday, Thursday, I went to a poxy little shop that had a Post Office instead of a back wall. All very quaintly medieval. There was an Islamic sticker above the window, which isn’t remotely appropriate for a publicly owned body, and downright perverse considering it’s the Royal Mail and most of the royals are at least nominally Church of England. I explained who I was and what had happened, and he got the package down from a shelf.

Then he put it back up again and said that I couldn’t have it without the card. By this point he was basically just teasing me.

Well. I was at most half-sure I knew where the card was, but I wasn’t totally convinced there was any way for me to get it and in any case I was not going to go there again: it’s a long way from my flat to the random assortment of Post Offices that have the facility to accept incoming mail — I don’t mean to overstate this point, but that’s a facility which my flat has and is the sole purpose of the Royal Mail’s existence. So I explained to him that I wasn’t told I’d need the card, and I didn’t have the card and it was impossible for me to ever get the card, and he shrugged and looked at me in that way that people behind counters have that means “not my problem mate”, and I think he thought I’d leave. The fool.

I continued to stand there, and I gave him my look that means “if you want to serve the woman behind me then it has just become your problem”, and I don’t know how much of that came across, but he had a bit of a think and after a while he got a bit of paper, wrote down that I’d took the package, and made me sign it, and gave me the package — after checking my ID against my driver’s license. (On a similar topic, a sign next to the window listed acceptable types of ID for some service or other, and one of them was “full (not provisional) driver’s license”. That’s crazy. There are no extra ID checks between them. Essentially, they were basing their assessment of your identity on your ability to drive.) Presumably if someone else had come the day after with the little card he’d have shown them the paper, said “you collected it yesterday, look, I have a signed bit of paper to prove it” and given them his “not my problem” look. I realise now I’m criticising both of his available options, but the point is really that he should never have ended up in that position, not least because if they’d just been a bit more persistent with the intercom they’d have been able to hand the thing over in person on Monday — there was someone in.

All of this took most of the week, involved a long walk, and cost me an extra fifty fucking pence. I know that’s a pathetic amount of money but I very much resent being charged extra for all this extra hassle. That guy was lucky I didn’t have much copper on me.

And they have the nerve to call this their “local collect service”. At least two of those words are lies.

So again I ask: why should I care if they close a load of local Post Offices if they’re not going to use the ones they’ve got?

I can’t imagine what part of this anything thinks is remotely acceptable.