News from the rabbit hole

Do you remember the blog about the missing parcel? If not, just scroll back a bit: it's easy enough to find, being full of capital letters and bleeped out expletives. Well, it suddenly occurred to me this morning that my complaint and claim for compensation remains unanswered, so I decided to ring the Post Office. For those of you of a nervous disposition, I have streamlined the whole process, because being taken click by click through the umpteen 'press 2 to be completely fobbed off' choices would be depressing. So, here it is, in slightly truncated form.

1. Find the phone number. Difficult, because the person at the post office had only copied one side of the form, but no matter, there is a website after all, so I went there. 
2. Ring the number on the website because, although there are apparently options to contact them online, there is no way to do that because their handy virtual woman who does didn't understand my question, apparently.
3. Wait for answer from human being.
4. Ditto
5. Ditto
6. Ditto
7. Ditto
8. Ditto - during all this I have fed the cat, cleaned my teeth, brushed my hair, got dressed, fed the rabbits, got older.
9. Speak to woman - lovely girl, Ashley, sounds very nice, so I explain.
10. She asks me for my eye slash number.
11. Eye slash?
12. The number on your letter.
13. We haven't had a letter.
14. Aaaaah, she says, I see what's gone wrong here.
15. Oh? I say through very gritted teeth. Perhaps here I should say that I have had to pass the phone across to my husband so that he can explain that he is here and that I am allowed to speak on his behalf. They are probably thinking, 'Bless! He's a bit simple and can't manage the long words.' Actually, he is too furious to be terribly coherent.
16. Oh? I say, what's gone wrong?
17. You have to leave it fifteen working days.
18. Yes, I say, we left it weeks. You can't leave it too long with eBay because people, quite rightly, get a little testy.
19. You only left it fourteen days, she says, so we refused the compensation request. We sent a letter on 4 December.
20. We didn't get a letter, (see 13).
21. Well, she says, now it is more than fifteen days (and how) I will start it up again and you will hear from us in 7-10 working days with some compensation.

I felt a Bah Humbug coming on - why does the Post Office not understand that we as their customers expect the system to work. Wrap parcel. Buy stamps. Post parcel. Get ecstatic thanks from recipient. Instead of, more often than not, filling in forms and spending half an hour on the phone listening to six bars of Handel on a loop.

Watch this space - I can't help thinking that there will be much, much more!