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!

I might as well have shoved it down a rabbit hole ...

I posted a parcel the week before last. The packaging, if I say so myself, was a work of art. Bubble wrap, wrapped in newspaper (Daily Mail but surely that can't tell against me!), in a cardboard box, in brown paper. The address was written on it in letters so clear, large and black they would have won any calligraphy competition in town. My own address was written, smaller and on the reverse, so that it could come back to me if things went wrong.

Well, things went wrong. The recipient (if I can call him the recipient, as he received sweet fanny adams) got in touch, not crossly, more disappointed really, to say that he had not got his parcel. The post office at our end no longer has the parcel.

WHERE IS OUR PARCEL???????

Okay, I didn't insure it. I didn't pay a king's ransom to have the dratted thing carried on the backs of Circassian maidens to the destination, or whatever the Post Office claim to do when you book special delivery. I merely put a parcel, wrapped as above, addressed as above, into the post office system and stupidly expected it to get to where it was meant to be. So now the post office are making me feel like some kind of certifiable idiot. I am a certifiable idiot because I expected a system to work, am I? Why should that be? When I get in my car and drive off, I expect the wheels to stay on, the engine to keep doing whatever it is engines do and take me to where I am heading. Sometime things go wrong, then I call a man who comes and puts it right. What doesn't happen, but would if the Post Office were in charge, would be that I would get in my car, one wheel would drop off, the engine would explode. I would call the man, who wouldn't come, because ... well, why should he? It's only his job, when all is said and done.

For a bit of fun, apply Post Office ethos to anything you do today. Toaster making toast? I don't think so. Bus taking you to work? Why not enjoy a day in Glasgow instead? That is, unless you work in Glasgow, in which case obviously, just enter another place name to taste. And so on. There are not huge numbers of options for simple pieces of post, sadly, but the Post Office will soon have seen the last of me. Though it is far more complicated I will be using a courier in future because if they say they will deliver it, they will. Some companies even give you the actual hour it will be delivered. The hour! Not the week or whether it will be delivered at all. The actual hour. And, when it gets to the other end, they bring it in if it is heavy. They are charming and friendly and that is because they see their job as a service, not some kind of mad lottery.

I actually do feel a lot better for that. But the question still remains -

WHERE IS OUR &*^%^$^&&*( PARCEL??

Sorry, I just have to add this - I posted this and then checked my inbox and there, proudly announcing itself as being from 'express parcelforce', was an email telling me when I need to post parcels for Christmas! What? With the service they give, I'm guessing that would have been last week!