Absnasm has high apple-pie in the sky hopes for 2010!
Royal Mail, I thought you were providing a service to me, for which I pay handsomely? So how come, when I’m not in during work hours to receive a parcel of goodies, you retain it in your office, which you have conveniently situated miles from bloody anywhere? And how come the only time your office is open for me to come and pick up said parcel is between the hours of 7am and 12:30 – during work hours? And how come the only time I can even call you to arrange for you to attempt to deliver it again is between the hours of 7am and 12:30 – during work hours? And how come when I try to call between those times it takes two hours for you to even answer the phone because it’s constantly engaged? And how come you can’t redeliver it to my office instead, even though I could provide proof of who I am, or even to the post office that is right next door to my place of work, because – oh, how inconvenient of me! – they’re in a different postcode area, and even if I was to arrange for it to be delivered to another post office within my postcode area – which, incidentally, I couldn’t get to because I work for a living – you would charge me 50p for the privilege? “Can we leave it with a neighbour?” “Er, have you met my neighbours?” The man did have the good grace to laugh when I told him which street I live on, I’ll give him that. So now you’re having another go at delivering it tomorrow, because by pure fluke my flatmate is off work at the moment, but you’re only going to try only cos I rang to ask nicely, and if you can’t deliver it tomorrow, I have to waste another two hours trying to get through to you to ask nicely again, otherwise my parcel will just languish in your office. Surely you should just keep trying to deliver it until I tell you to stop? Cos that’s what you do, you deliver stuff? But no, no, no, if you haven’t managed to get it to me within three weeks, because you’re bloody useless, you’ll assume I don’t want it and send it back!
And while I’m at it, the shops are shit. It’s bad enough that a customer usually has to queue for a minimum of 20 minutes, but now you’ve complicated the whole issue of posting parcels with your price rejigging so now we not only have to weigh stuff prior to posting, but measure it against a special piece of cardboard. You know what you’re like? You’re like a boyfriend who’s too cowardly to dump his lass so he starts behaving in really annoying and illogical ways in the hope that she might do the job for him. But we don’t have any option but to use you. You are our only choice, no one else does what you do, unless we want to pay through the nose for delivery services who do exactly the same thing but just have less offices to which we would have to trek even further to get our hands on our lovely stuff.
Listen, Royal Mail, you need to get with the programme. You are stuck in the past. Understand this – people work. People are out at work all day, earning money so they can buy stuff for you to deliver. They do not live at your convenience. You exist for ours. You were created to get stuff to us. But when you make it nigh-on impossible for us to get our hands on stuff that is rightly ours, because we have the sheer cheek to go out to work, that’s just insane. We don’t live in nuclear families, with the daddy out at work and the mummy home making cakes all day. A lot of us don’t have cars, we can’t drive three miles out of our way to an out-of-town post office to pick up a parcel during a three-hour time slot when we should be at work. We don’t live in quaint little villages with friendly Old Mrs Yummybun living next door, happy to guard our property until we pop round for tea and cakes. We need you to bring our stuff when we’re there – in the evening. Is that so hard to understand? And there’s an added bonus – deliver stuff to us in the evening, when we’re there, and you no longer have to spend all night sorting post while we sleep. You no longer have to pay your staff to stay up all night grafting to get stuff on our doorstep before we’re even awake. Let’s face it, who deals with post that early anyway? Would it really make a difference to anyone if it came at 6.30pm instead? Yes, it would – we’d probably open it and deal with it instead of blearily glancing at it and chucking it in a pile. Everyone’s a winner.
