Royal Mess

This country is a complete joke.

Apparently we are the forth richest nation in the world - and yet we don't even have the competence to manage our own rail system so that trains arrive on time, or our own mail system so that letters arrive ...at all.

In the past 6 months, we have had countless items delivered to the WRONG SODDING HOUSE rather than ours. We rely on the good nature of our neighbours to re-deliver our mail to its correct address, and we, in return, re-delived their mail that inevitably and erroneously lands through our door. I didn't realise how terribly confusing it must be for those poor postmen, what with us living at Number 4 and all. I really feel for people who live at houses with numbers so impossibly large that they cannot even be counted on the fingers of both hands.

Apart from the incovenience of receiving bills late, we have had over £60 worth of DVDs and CDs, bought from Amazon, go mysteriously missing. After several complaints to Royal Mail, they still never materialised, but thankfully the people at Amazon seem to be so familiar with this scenario, that they sent us replacements without so much as a second guess.

To top off my general contempt for the Royal Mail they have gone and outdone their own levels of utter incompetance. Seeing as the nearest branch of my bank is in Glasgow (and because my university insists on paying my stipend by cheque rather than directly through BACS), I have to mail my stipend off before it comes on to my account. Prepared to ignore the sheer inefficiency of this system, given how straightforwad modern e-commerce should be, I grin and bear the process. But there is only so much ineptitude I can take!

April 7th was when I posted my much needed stipend cheque off to my bank. April 7th!! I paid extra to have the bloody envelope "Recorded" seeing as it had my next 3 months money contained within it. So imagine my surprise when I check my balance expecting a nice healthy positive number, to find a worryingly depressing negative one.

Trying not to fret too much about it, I logged on to the website available to track your mail, and entered the little reference code that I had spent the extra time, care and expense paying for. Apparently tracking Recorded mail means that "items are only tracked after the item has been delivered". Of course! Why did I stupidly expect them to KNOW where the hell my letter was, just because I'd asked it to be recorded! Thats like having a tracker dog that could only find drugs once you'd unstuffed them from inside the "I Love Amsterdam" teddy bear and plonked them right in front of its nose. Useless!

On contacting said *COUGH muppets COUGH* mail service in person, I was then just told to phone my bank, as of course it was probably them who had infact made the error, and had no doubt just "forgotten" to deal with banking my cheque..... So I checked. And they haven't.

The Royal Mail is a disgrace. It is a complete farce. How come people get away with not doing their own jobs - what they are after all paid to do - properly??? Surely, if everyone made sure that they looked after their own little bit of responsibility, the world would be a much more bearable place to live in. If your job is to pick up mail, sort it, and then deliver it to the correct address, then how the f*ck can you make such a complete and utter balls of it?? I don't see where the difficulty lies. Its your JOB! You should be quite aware of how it works.

What happened to the country's 400 plus years of delivering mail religiously on time? The Mail Trains that were a national pride? Even sodding carrier pigeons seemed to be more efficient!! I realise that not all postpeople are the fools I believe them to be, but by letting those wankers who don't care enough about their job to actually do it properly get away with it, then they are tarring themselves with the same brush.

Amusingly, I have just this second had to go answer the door to a confused looking Postman looking for an address he couldn't find. As much as I felt like berrating him with my frustrations, I decided to just be nice and help him out, in the hope that someone, somewhere is doing the same for my mail.