Posts Tagged royal mail

The other day whilst sitting at home, I watched the postman draw up outside the house, post an item through our letterbox, and drive off.

I got up to see to see what he’d delivered. It was a small red card, entited “Sorry, you were out”, directing me to pick up a undeliverable parcel from the delivery office.

Oh, how strange, I thought. Despite being here all day I was apparently, by Royal Mail standards, “out”. Annoying too, because our local delivery office is a bugger to get to. I also wondered vaguely how he’d managed to decide we were out and write that card in the few seconds he’d been parked outside.

I’ve since learned that it’s fairly common practice these days for posties, when collecting the mail they have to deliver in the mornings, to make an “executive decision” not pick up bulky items that in all likelyhood they’re going to end up bringing back to the depot undelivered due to the recipients being at work.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. But with the Royal Mail increasingly under pressure from falling amounts of “snail mail” and parcels being one of the few areas still booming (due to the increasing amount of internet shopping) you’d think they’d make a special effort to try and deliver them, wouldn’t you?

They even write the little red cards while still at the post office. Saves even more time, and avoids that tricky situation of having someone open the the door while you’re busy writing the card saying that they’re out.

My wife has been at home (mostly) for more than half a year now, caring for a bump and then caring for the baby that it turned into. More than enough time, you would have thought, for the postie to begin to realise that there was a car with a baby seat parked out the front of our house for a reason, and save us the effort of going to collect parcels someone has paid to have delivered to the door.

But, these are hard times, and posties are stretched to do more with less time just like the rest of us. I think what annoys me most is that the existing card that the Royal Mail provide doesn’t cover the actual eventualities faced by it’s post-people, thus forcing them to effectively tell big fat porkies.

We got another “while you were out card” this morning, despite Jane being there all day. Perhaps it should have looked more like this: