WAITING IN

Saturday was mostly spent waiting in for a couple of books that I'd ordered to finally turn up, after a week featuring a mammoth amount of irritation from dealing with the online retailer who sold them to me, who appear to have decided to alter their delivery system, one which has worked reasonably adequately for several years, presumably just because my circumstances would make the new set-up far more inconvenient.

Mostly, I'm objecting that they seem to have made getting the stuff I ordered to me my problem rather than theirs, however, that rant is already written and parked, because it's far too dull to share with you here... which, I'll have to admit, given most of my other content, would have to be going some.

The problem with waiting in is that it gets in the way of getting anything else done. You can barely dare to get out of earshot from any of your doors just in case that soft tapping occurs when you've sneaked upstairs for a moment, and return downstairs to find the latest "we tried to deliver your parcel" card sitting smugly on the doormat.

So, having spent a long time on the phone midweek, I finally got them to agree to try again on Saturday and the courier without a depot to otherwise collect from were supposed to make another run at getting my order to me sometime between 7.00am and 9.00pm, which rather put the kibosh on me doing anything else for the duration.

Sadly, I did have to pop out to take my beloved to the railway station at about 9.30am because she had an appointment arranged long before this latest opportunity, but, rather than accompanying her, maybe having a cup of coffee or a mooch around the shops, instead I was committed to being at home at the convenience of this courier service.

Rather more pleasingly, at least, the email telling me that my order was "out for delivery" didn't arrive until after I got back, so there was still a chance that my order would appear and I remained in limbo until either the books arrived, or I received the third "we were unable to deliver" message.

Anyway, I remained glued to the sofa, tapping away at my keyboard and watching some DVDs for several hours simply because I could not dare to move, just in case the mystery man turned up to make the delivery.

Eventually, of course, he did turn up, but not at the door I'd prefer him to, and much of the anxiety faded away and I could get on with my day, noticing that the packaging seems to only allow for three goes, and wondering what would have happened if I'd been too far away to hear his feeble knock...

To be honest, I'm seriously having to reconsider this whole online shopping option given that the goods no longer seem able to be sent to me in such a manner that I can actually easily receive them. At least with the Royal Mail I had a chance to use the "Option B" and go to the relatively local Post Office when they didn't find me at home, whereas this method seems to assume that I can totally rearrange my life to fit around their needs, or that I'm prepared to just let them cancel the order after they are "unable to deliver" after a week of waiting and several alleged attempts to deliver.

Things used to be so simple... but the company involved really don't seem to care about that.

UNCOLLECTABLE MAIL (UPDATE)

I sometimes think that I'm just really unlucky when it comes to sorting stuff out.

But then...

After reporting that normality had resumed at our local delivery office, I came home (far too late to make the opening times) the following Wednesday and found another red card waiting upon the doormat.

This time it mentioned two items; A book which I knew was on the way and a letter which needed to be "signed for" and which was probably some time-sensitive and no-doubt utterly vital document or other in relation to the handling of the Estate.

Important stuff, I'm sure.

So, on my way home from work on Thursday, I added the extra five mile round trip to my journey in order to collect these and found, to my dismay, that another notice was in the window of the Post Office telling its customers that it was closed because someone had had to go into hospital.

Again, sympathies, etc… but what was I supposed to do next…?

I went home, ranted away to myself for a bit, and telephoned the Royal Mail and, after listening to two minutes of recordings stating the bleeding obvious, I got through to a very friendly customer services operative who seemed as bewildered as I was about the situation, but who reassured me that they are "Legally bound to deliver the mail" and suggested that I should ring them again "after 8.00am tomorrow" because that's when the mail gets sorted and there's usually someone in the building to answer the phone…

Happily, due to m'colleagues having "half term" issues, I had decided to work from home on the Friday and so I had time to make the call, getting through at about ten past eight (and after having heard all of the bleeding obvious all over again), to another helpful chap who told me that he would ring through to the office itself and call me back to tell me what the plan was.

Naturally, he didn't.

Or…

If he did, it was that "You were called today at 10.23am… The caller left no number" message that I found on the phone later on, not that any kind of actual message had been left along with it, so it probably wasn't actually him but some other cold-calling nonsense of the kind I usually avoid by being at the office.

By now I'd already got twitchy enough about this important document to pass my mid-morning coffee break by leaping into the car and heading back to the office itself, just to see if, by some kind of miracle, it had actually opened again.

As I drove past, I noticed a whole group of people in the doorway, so I pulled up and walked back, only to find that it was rather emphatically closed again. A lady standing hopefully outside shared her understanding of the situation that the official gentlemen of the postal service were inside "sorting things out" and she was waiting on the off-chance that she might be able to get her own parcel as and when and if they opened the place up, although she'd already been told that they would most probably be taking everything back to the main sorting office a couple of towns away.

I decided not to wait and stomped tetchily back to the car and, after I'd turned around and was heading back through the village, saw the gentlemen of which she had spoken lugging sacks of mail back towards their vehicles whilst she explained to other unlucky customers about what she thought was going on.

I arrived home and chunnered to myself about what exactly I was supposed to do, and where exactly my vital documents might actually turn out to be, and when precisely they might be there if I headed over to try and track them down with my red card and my passport clutched hopefully in my tiny hands.

I decided to ring my sister and have another short rant about the problems involved in sorting out the Estate, but, perhaps luckily for both of us, she wasn't in, and so I made myself a cup of coffee instead and headed back to the work face.

Ten minutes later, there came a knocking at the door, and it was our much put-upon regular Postie clutching both my parcel and my vital documents in his hand and looking totally relieved at at least finding somebody at home somewhere.

We had a bit of a chat about the problems the local Office was having, and the difficulties it was causing, and how he couldn't hand the "Special Delivery" parcels intended for my neighbours over to me even if he wanted to, before going on his merry way with my red card back in his possession and a very long day in prospect, whilst I pondered again upon how sensible I'd been to decide to work from home that day.

So, for this time at least, my little problem has sorted itself out, and I am trying very hard to be sympathetic to the obviously serious problems which are besetting out tiny little local Post Office, but it doesn't half make me anxious.

UNCOLLECTABLE MAIL

Last week, once again, and no doubt because I'm a profligate online shopper, I received a card through the door informing me that a parcel needed collecting from our "local" Post Office, because it was too big to go through my letter box.

So far, so normal.

I knew exactly what it was; It was the inkjet cartridges I'd ordered for my printer in anticipation of the ones currently inside it running dry at precisely the moment that I needed to be printing off the various covering letters that I'd need to write whenever that glorious day came when some funds would be available to pay off some of the debts accrued by Mum's Estate.

Now, a few years ago, the Post Office which was a short stroll from my house was closed as part of the controversial cutbacks, and so the place I have to go to is now two-and-a-half miles away and, in the disinterest of the environment, involves a five mile round trip in the car if I am to manage it in the short amount of time available to me after work.

So, after a quick eye-roll and a short chunner about it being "Bloody typical!" that it should happen upon an evening where I had "other plans" for that time (Mostly, to be fair, involving the much delayed washing up…), I drove over there, but upon arriving there at around 5.15pm (ish), I found that the office was closed and there was a sign attached to the door saying that this was due to illness, but there was little indication of when it might reopen.

Still, that word "illness" guilted me enough to be not too irritated, and I went on my less-than-merry way, promising to myself to return within the eighteen day time period mentioned on the card. After all, happily, my printer still had some ink left in its cartridges, and my parcel wasn't exactly perishable.

I did wonder for a moment, because of the proximity of the date to St Valentine's Day, how many flowers and foodstuffs might be deteriorating in a Post Office van somewhere, but I decided that this probably wasn't really my concern.

The next day, because I'd decided to work from home due to the "terrifying" storms, I happened to "catch" the dear old Postie as he shoved some more soggy junk mail through my door, and I asked him whether he knew when that branch might be re-opening. He said that it had been a bit of a surprise to him, too, and, when I pressed him about whether my parcel might just still be in his van as a consequence, he said that it had all been returned to the main sorting office somewhere out in the wilds.

He also mentioned something in passing about someone telling him that they'd seen an ambulance at the Post Office on that afternoon, and it might be worth "leaving it a few days" before trying to collect it again, and so, once again, my guilt over their much bigger problems managed to suppress my annoyance at my own minor inconvenience.

The same situation still existed when I called again on my way to the supermarket at 10.00am on Saturday morning, by which time I was getting rather tetchy at the seeming lack of a "Plan B" with regards to where I might go to collect the blooming thing… but, at least, it wasn't actually a "blooming" thing that was slowly dying in a depot somewhere...

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds…"

I fully appreciated that this must have been a dire emergency situation for the owners of that little sub-Post Office, but you do find yourself asking what exactly is the "Plan B" when it comes to parcel collection under such circumstances, or where you have to go to to find any information about when the branch is likely to re-open, given that the telephone number on the card is to the very place which remained steadfastly closed…

Rather naturally, as is my wont, I finally decided to use the Royal Mail website to make an enquiry, only to find that, on the very same evening, the place in question was open and working normally again.

I always do this.

My complaints about the "late delivery" of something or other from an online retailer is almost always sent just one day too soon, and the parcel inevitably turns up the next day. Very late, well beyond the limits of my over-streched patience, and just late enough for me to have the inconvenience of having to return the duplicate order when it finally turns up.

I suppose that it's just another one of those weird life situations, really, but how exactly do you collect your parcel when the place you're supposed to get it from is closed and shows no sign of reopening…?

RANDOM POST

We have a regular postal delivery operative. His name is Barry and he's been delivering in these here parts for years. Unfortunately, on occasions, Barry the Postie is unavailable and his delivery duties are fobbed off onto one of his lesser colleagues, at least one of whom, it seems, has a very random approach to house numbers.

There is a rather massive house number on italian tiles cemented to the post at the side of our back door, but that doesn't seem to be enough of a clue. When it got really bad one time I stuck a "Post-It" note to the letterbox with "THIS IS NUMBER XX" written upon it which may have got the point across but I doubt it.

I know that Barry is off because I regularly get large quantities of mail addressed to the house next door pushed through my letterbox on an almost daily basis, and then find my neighbours posting my mail through at some time long after they've finished work for the day and finally got home.

Meanwhile, I know that a comfortably letterbox-sized parcel is long overdue (I hope whoever got it is enjoying my film...) and I got an "undeliverable item" message from Amazon over the weekend for yet another parcel that wasn't even due to be delivered for another four days.

Perhaps the Royal Mail simply couldn't be bothered finding out where to send it...?

Anyway, after festering and fuming over these various inconveniences for a while, I decided that it might be worth putting in a complaint. After all, I reasoned, having someone looking into the situation couldn't do any harm could it...?

Of course, they DO know where I live... Or rather, they claim to.

When it comes to my actual mail, I'm not quite convinced about that.

So, after a swift search, I negotiated my way around their fiendishly clever website and, after finding the most relevant looking link, I sent them this:

I really feel that I ought to inform you about how our mail delivery service becomes far worse whenever our "regular" delivery operative is on holiday. 

It's almost as if the stand-ins cannot be bothered in some way, or take a rather random approach to house numbering. I regularly get mail posted through for the wrong house and have to pass it on, and mine seems to get posted through a neighbour's house and they usually pass it on to me.

Not only that but our usually reliable service from companies like Amazon seem to get delayed significantly or fail to turn up at all, and letters which are due on a particular date - like the MOT reminders or credit card bills - also fail to appear on schedule.

I even got notification of "undeliverable mail" for an item ordered over the internet this week, something which has never occurred before in over a decade of dealing with that company from my current address, and during a period when I happened to be working from home.

All-in-all the service declines in quality for a while and then appears to recover and I feel that it might be something that is worth further investigation. 

Many thanks!

To which I very swiftly received an auto-reply from the Post Office and, later on, an actual email telling me that the Post Office didn't actually deal with mail deliveries and I should forward any complaints I had to the Royal Mail via a link which took me back to the very same website which I'd first gone through.

I don't know. Anyone would think that they didn't want to encourage people to complain...

Anyway, I examined the website in more detail and zapped off my email again, having luckily hung on to the text from the first version just in case I needed it again. The standard reply came through the next day, a lengthy piece that burbled on about the millions of items they handle each day, and that if I had specific items which had gone missing, how I could fill in a claim form, but nothing, really, which addressed any of the specific issues which I had been hoping to flag up to them.

I sighed deeply to myself, realised that I was probably wasting my time, and gave up, resigning myself to occasional periods of shoddy service ironically on the very day that Barry returned from wherever he'd been and some of my long overdue items actually turned up...

The thing is that I really don't like complaining about the postal service. After all, they are doing a pretty good job under very difficult circumstances and, most of the time, things tick along just swimmingly... (All they need now is for some idiot to come along and try to privatise the whole lot and we might as well send it to hell in a handcart... Oh... Wait...)

It's just that every so often around here, it all just seems to fall apart around here for a few weeks and if you don't let anyone know about this, presumably it'll just keep on happening.

Meanwhile, I realise that I've got to that sort of age where complaining about things seems perfectly acceptable behaviour.

Oh my...!

Post Office!?! Look at what you've brought me to!!! I'm even using multiple exclamation marks now because of you and your irritating ways...!

Swines.

BAD POSTIE

I’ve recently been suffering from “Bad Postie” syndrome, which is due to a situation that has developed in which a reasonable amount of things mail-related have gone wrong to the level that it’s now become a source of anxiety, and, in an era when the dear old Royal Mail really needs all of the help it can get, and when it really should be making a bit of an effort after the general all-round sense of bad feeling generated by the recent price-hike, this is probably not a good thing, although I accept that the problems of one small letterbox don’t add up to a hill of beans in this great big world of ours, and maybe the rest of the system is pootling along nicely.

Mind you, if, like a cosmetics company, you extrapolate this one tiny sample out to imply similar results across the entire population (“1 of 1 people sampled…”) maybe the entire postal service is falling apart so much that they might as well have been put in charge of security at the Olympic Games (bit of politics there, yes indeedy...!)

I got home last week to find an unexpected and rather huge pile of mail, none of which was for me and all of which was for next door despite the number being prominently displayed at the back of the house. I, naturally, posted it through… But then, on another weekend, my own post appeared on my own doormat courtesy of another neighbour late on a Sunday evening after she’d been away for the weekend and long after the time we expected it to. This was our weekend DVD rental and it was by then far too late in the actual weekend to give us time to actually view it, but that, in itself, was not a tragedy.

Shortly after that had happened, yet another neighbour knocked at the back door asking if we were the people that this parcel “failure to deliver” card was meant for because it had been left outside his door and it really wasn’t him.

It wasn’t us either, but I kept him talking for five minutes anyway which caused the beloved to mock me and my “little ways” for hours afterwards which I know wasn’t strictly the Royal Mail’s fault, but they did act as the catalyst…

Then one of our disc rentals turned up in the wrong series order and when I went to check online I found out that our account had been suspended because one of the discs had been returned as “wrongly delivered” which meant that it had gone “somewhere” and that “somewhere” was far enough away for the stroll round to pop it through our door was far too much of a faff for whoever it was.

All-in-all, the whole “Royal Mail” situation was starting to look as if it was unravelling rather, and throughout it all, rather significantly, neither our house nor ourselves had relocated or been relabeled in any way whatsoever. We had steadfastly remained in exactly the same spot where our mail had turned up with an acceptable level of success and regularity for quite a considerable sum of years.

The problem is, of course, that you can’t control it for yourself. If your “precious thing” gets put through the wrong door and that person is away on holiday or, perhaps, a less honest person than yourself, you can very quickly find yourself wondering where things have vanished to. It’s even worse when you start to notice that you haven’t had the expected bills, or credit card accounts, or bank statements because, in this age of identity theft and whatnot, it doesn’t take much to make you feel really, really concerned about it all.

So far I’ve refrained from complaining, but I have (ironically) put a “Post-It” note (other self-adhesive notepapers are available) on the letterbox saying “This is number…” and written our number in large chunky and everso slightly friendly looking letters, so I hope he’ll take the hint…

He might just think that I’m extracting the Michael, although I did decide not to add a cheeky exclamation point, so I can’t think why he should. Nevertheless, you have to do what you have to do and, to be honest, as long as he doesn’t decide to post cat excrement or petrol through the letterbox, and does, in the end, give me the correct post, I’m not all that bothered about whether he finds it all a bit patronising.

To be honest, I think it’s more of a problem that is caused by his colleagues on the regular guy’s days off, but what do I know...?

Still, I hope that it manages to sort itself out, otherwise I’ll be composing that “stiff letter of complaint”, although I don’t suppose there’s much point in posting it.

After all, God only knows where it would end up…

UNKNOWN QUANTITIES

I still haven’t met the new neighbours yet. Despite the fact that they’ve been living there for nearly a year now, our paths still haven’t actually properly crossed. Faces have been seen, and awkward smiles exchanged as we variously dash about, of course, but we haven’t been formally introduced, or, perhaps more reasonably formally introduced ourselves to one another, and we remain unknown quantities to each other. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that of course, unless you really want to read things into it like it being symptomatic of the general crumbling of society because “people just don’t talk to their neighbours any more”. It’s much less sinister than that. We just have different lifestyles, work at different times and generally haven’t been poking our noses out of our front door and into each other’s business much over the year since they moved in, that’s all.

Granted this lack of knowledge can lead to strange moments of paranoia and a slight feeling of fear of the unknown. When strange letters turn up from the land registry aiming to clarify the boundaries of your property, you can find yourself wondering why they have and whether some kind of dispute is in the offing, even though it’s much more likely that some “I”s needed dotting and “T”s crossing due to some administrative shenanigans that came up during the sale.

We are very aware of the various cats though, which seem sweet enough, although, because of the great yawning knowledge gap when it comes to basic information, the fact that the cats always seem to be slightly different to the ones we saw the previous day so we’re never quite certain whether they actually live there permanently, are replacements for other ones that came to an unfortunate end or are the end result some kind of complex breeding or gifting process that we can only begin to guess at. All I know is that they are either bonsai cats or there is some kind of elixir of youth thing going on with their Whiskas, as the young kittens never seem to age.

This does make me imagine, in my more unusual moments, that I’m actually living next door to some kind of super villain or scientific genius, one who has discovered the secret of eternal youth and now plans to conquer the world, Mwahahahahahahahah!!!! This, I suspect, is not really what’s going on at all, although it is truly bizarre what the brain chooses to make of the various bangs, bumps and boings that you get to hear through the typical adjoining wall. I have occasional visions of a huge wrecking ball relentlessly bashing into it, with a crazed Quasimodo swinging dementedly from the chain, but then I’m just as sure that our own, coughs, sneezes and the many colourful epithets that I scream merrily at the computer screen create an equally bizarre picture of life here at Lesser Blogfordshire H.Q. that probably doesn’t bear thinking about. After all, I can clearly remember my “downstairs neighbour” at college once asking me about the noise that sounded like a rolling marble that constantly seemed to be coming from the ceiling above her, and I could never really explain it. I think she believed that I was holding some kind of international marbles competition in the confines of my own little room, although I suspect that what was really going on was that I was quite simply losing my marbles as they escaped through one of their many secret tunnels under cover of darkness.

However, when you open the front door and a little piece of cardboard from some courier or other flutters to the ground telling you that they tried to deliver your parcel and you weren’t in, even though you were, and informs you that it has been left with the great unknown next door, and you realise that some kind of official first contact is suddenly imminent, your mind can go into all kinds of loops. What if they turn out to be devious people who deny all knowledge of my much anticipated parcel? What if they open the door and I wave my sorry bit of cardboard at them and they deny all knowledge? “Don’t know what you’re talking about, mate!” What do I do then? Obviously the courier wouldn’t know that our timelines never seem to cross, or that there might be some long standing feud between us, or that they might be about to go off on some three month  expedition with my silly little delivery still parked in the corner of their living room.

Then the paranoia starts to grow as I knock upon their door a few times and there is no reply and the house looks like it’s been empty for a while and also as if it might remain so. The blinds are down and nobody’s home. How can this be? I mean, the courier managed to find them at home, so why can’t I?

How to approach it, anyway…? My mind creates little scenarios “I think you may have a parcel of mine…”

No.

Too pompous.

Perhaps something lighter…? All of this planning remains utterly irrelevant because over the course of the next 24 hours, they never seem to be home. At least not when I am at any rate, and then I realise that I’ve got to go out that evening, probably at just the time they are at home. How many times will they bother tapping on my door before they just give up and assume nobody actually wants my parcel?

It is, after all, a bit of an intimidating responsibility anyway, saying you’ll take charge of a delivery for someone. What if they say you never gave it to them? What if it gets broken? Or stolen? What is the responsibility you take on board when Mr Parcel Postie catches your eye and says “Can you see that those at number 12 get this, please…?” What if those lovely folk at number 12 are away? I could be sadly trudging over there for weeks…

Anyway, I stuck my nose out of the door mid-afternoon, just to take a peek at the curtains next door to see if there was any sign of life, just as he got home from work. With a cheery hello he told me he had a parcel of mine. I, rather bizarrely, produce the bit of cardboard with a flourish and say “That’ll explain this then!” and the mysterious exchange of goods is made and, thanks duly given, we go our separate ways again.

And I still forgot to introduce myself…

REAL POST

Rather funkily I got some proper post recently. Not a bill, not junk mail and not another of my stupid so-called bargains, but genuine, unexpected and proper, genuine, actual post and, do you know, it rather made my day.

It came from out of the blue, you see. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, from my limited circle of actual, genuine human friends and acquaintances, ever sends me anything via the Royal Mail any more that I wasn’t really already expecting. I get a few birthday cards and Christmas cards like anyone else, but the senders and the numbers are always pretty much a known quantity before even one envelope has been sealed or one bauble dangled in a supermarket.

Most of my limited personal contact with the great big wide old world comes through emails and the occasional telephone call and through the comments section on the increasingly unloved postings in Lesser Blogfordshire. I look into cellphone tariffs and remained highly amused that anyone would think me capable of sending 1000 texts in any given calendar month and it’s rather laughable that I could even find enough to say on the phone whilst I was roaming around and about that could ever add up to 600 minutes a month.

I am not, after all, a businessman and, let’s be perfectly frank here, I don’t know that many people and those I do know I will either speak to in person or ring them up from home.

Anyway, for any and all of those reasons, getting an unexpected communication delivered through the door was suddenly one of those tiny miracles of life that can make your day when it happens to you, more especially if you happen to be me.

So, what was it? I hear you ask, although I’m not sure I want to tell you. Happily enough, the recycled and home-fashioned envelope made up from some Amazon parcel packaging is currently sitting right beside me and, unless the security services have taken the unlikely step of putting spy cameras in my unthreatening little dwelling place, it is unlikely that any unscrupulous journalist will be able to hack into the contents and reveal what was being sent to me to the wider public at large.

Ha! Hah! Take that you foul denizens of the Fourth Estate! You can’t peek into my private communications without doing something even more illegal than you usually would!

That’ll teach them.

So have they gone now? It’s just you and me now is it? All right then…

I got sent a rather impressive collection of cartoon images and witty poetry created by a dear and much valued friend of mine who’s been having rather a rough time of things over a number of years, and they were all rather brilliant, if you ask me. Granted, my opinion is seldom worth much to anyone, but I rather enjoyed the few minutes it took me to look through them and laugh out loud along with them, and, whilst I also felt a little sad at both the loss to the world that their inability to produce much work over the years has meant, and the realisation it also brought home about my own limited talent in comparison, I can’t remember receiving a happier piece of mail in a long, long time.

Sometimes I think it’s so unfortunate that we’ve allowed the personal touch to slip out of so many of our communications in recent times, so, go on. Make someone’s day and write them a letter.

I know I won’t…

But then you knew that anyway, didn’t you, and it really shouldn’t stop you from doing it. After all, if you’re doing the opposite of whatever I’m doing, then you’re probably getting something right…

EVER SO SLIGHTLY P.O.ED

Really, really not important in the great scheme of things, but, well...
Oh, you know...

Regular visitors to me here in Lesser Blogfordshire (and there are at least two of you) will know of my continuing mild irritation at the minor frustrations that home shopping can bring out of the woodwork, and sadly, I’m here tapping out another slight tale of woe for you today.

You may want to look away now, put your face into your palm or scream “Oh no! Not again!” at this point depending on preference.

During a recent lunchbreak, I took it upon myself to take advantage of a slight gap between the downpours to open up my front door and take a breath of fresh air before returning to my duties and toils in the pursuit of that crust I try to earn.

As I opened the door, there was a slight fluttering sensation in the corner of my eye as a piece of red and white cardboard took flight from the door jamb that had it held feebly in its grip and span ever so elegantly towards the doorstep at my feet.

I bent down to examine it, knowing fully well already what it would be, and I was right. It was a Post Office “Sorry you were out when we tried to deliver your parcel” card. Of course, the assumption behind this statement is that I was actually out, which of course, being dedicated to my desire of crust earning, I was not, but I know very well from past experience that this is something I must learn to live with.

The part of the house I converted into my office space is about as far from the front door as it is possible to be in such a tiny space and so sometimes the feeble tappings that come from our solid metal brass effect door-knocker fail to penetrate the vast distances required and I don’t hear them.

The other issue is of course the lack of a letterbox.

Having suffered the howling gales of far too many winters hereabouts, when we decided to buy new doors and windows from the lovely double glazing people a few years ago, we chose not to have one on that door because of the draughts that used to scream through the old door, aiming to pass straight through us on their way to the chimney and out of our lives. Most of our legitimate postal deliveries came through the back door anyway, so we decided such an opening was unnecessary.

It doesn’t half confuse those lovely people delivering pizza flyers, though.

For some reason, though, some of our parcel delivery couriers prefer to use that door to not deliver their packages to, whilst others use the other one, but there’s seldom any consistency to this and, like a lot of things these days, we’re learning to live with it. Meanwhile they hide their cards under and behind plant pots or sometimes just put them on the step where they’re sure to blow away or, as in this case, attempt to jam them into the slight gap around the door frame and the door itself. I don’t know, but I like to think that if it was me, I might just go and look if there was another letterbox somewhere, not least because there is bound to be one somewhere on most houses I would have thought, but I think my expectations are way too high generally.

Anyway, I picked the card up and read that they tried to deliver this mystery object at 11.00AM (at which time I can assure you, I was very much in) but because I am not psychic enough to have known this beforehand, said package would be returned to the Post Office where I could collect it later.

Now, since the local Post Office that was a short hoppity-skip away was closed due to lack of interest a couple of years ago, at about the same time they took the morning bus away (on the very day that Greater Blogfordshire announced its new exciting plans for better public transport I might add), I now have a five mile round trip to make if I need to make these collections. Interestingly, at a bureaucratic stroke of a pen or two, two of the reasons that made this house so ideal when I chose to buy it, i.e. good transport links and a local Post Office, were suddenly removed without me having any influence at all over the matter. The bus service that was so vital to the few to whom it was essential was “no longer viable” and the Post Office probably would have still closed even if I personally had gone in every single day because, unless everyone else did as well, little old me would not viability have made.

Strangely, of course, for many people now to be able to get to the nearest available Post Office, that redundant bus route would have proved ideal.

Dear old anonymous Postie had helpfully written a number 2 in the blank spot on the card which said that I should leave it a (blank) number of hours before trying to collect it.

“Oh goody!” thunk I, “’tis a quarter to two. That’s nearly three hours!” so I decided to forsake my little lunchtime tea-break/breath-of-fresh-air combo and grabbed the car keys and dragged myself to the Post Office to collect this still mysterious delight from them.

Sadly, the Postie had lied to me. Their “2” was, at best, a vague guesstimate and they were still out and about on the streets of Lesser Blogfordshire writing their little cards and failing to deliver their consignment of wonders to their eager future owners, and I had to return home empty-handed with the mocking laughter of the counter staff still ringing in my ears.

“Ho! Ho! Ho! They had laughed, “You don’t expect them to be able to tell the time as well, do you?”

Frankly, when it’s my time they’re wasting, then, yes, I darned well do! Why on Earth would you write a “2” if you didn’t mean a “2”? It’s not as if I wouldn’t have been quite content if they’d written a “6” to head over there after 5.00PM, is it?

Anyway, I had to go back later, and braved their inevitable mocking tones once more, and I didn’t completely grind my teeth to a pulp in an effort to keep myself calm and not cause a scene when they did.

After all, it’s not as if customer service is something important or worth getting worked up about, is it?

TO HAVE

Those of you who come here regularly will have noticed a slight tendency to make mountains out of molehills, or perhaps for me to make high dramas out of the most mundane of crises, however, there is a strong literary tradition for over-elaboration of the tiniest events, and I’ve never been one to buck with tradition.

So, with a certain amount of inevitability, it’s time to conclude one of the smaller sagas that have been gnawing away at these humble pages for the last couple of weeks, namely the long-lost  Humphrey Bogart films and how the stupidly complicated story of their disappearance finally resolved itself.

I bet you can hardly wait.

And so it came to pass that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did indeed pass through the letterbox of MAWH Towers upon a recent Friday lunchtime.

And, as is the way with these things, they must have enjoyed it so much that they did so again whilst I was out on Saturday, so now the inevitable two copies are sitting around the house mocking me, and with the sorry irony that only a disappointment with the much anticipated can muster, I haven’t had a spare minute this weekend to give them even the most cursory of glances.

One will have to go back, of course.

Which leads us into the merry dance of the “returns policy”.

Sigh!

To quote the rather good email – and it was, really, very good and much appreciated especially as he did take the time to re-send the order at a time when it was utterly lost in limbo - from “Customer Services Daniel”:-

“WHAT IF I GET TWO PACKAGES? – If the original package should arrive before the replacement is dispatched…” (actually, due to the strange wibbly wobbly time effects of the postal service the replacement arrived before the original) “…please cancel your replacement order, etc…”

“If the original package should arrive afterwards, please refuse delivery of the parcel so it is returned to us by the carrier.”

Now our postie is an affable enough young chap and I wasn’t sure how he would take too the rejection, but I stirred myself in readiness.

Unfortunately I was out, and when I got home, said parcel was upon the doormat, smiling that cheeky “gotcha” smile up at me.

So then we get to “If you were unable to refuse delivery of the item…” (and really, how could I? If I'd been in, such a rejection might have stung the poor lad or done him considerable emotional harm…) “...we ask that you return it to us” and the usual means of doing this come into play.

Now I don’t mind this. I’ve done it before. Sometimes it’s a bind because I then find all the printer cartridges have run out when I try to print off the returns voucher, so I end up having to order more of them, but that’s probably my fault for not keeping the stocks up enough.

What did annoy me, though, was the fact that this time, the printed returns voucher said those doom laden words “You will have to pay postage” so, instead of just popping it into a postbox over the weekend, I’m now stuck with the chore of finding some time in my busy schedule to trudge over to one of the far distant and few remaining Post Offices around these parts and fork out any savings I may have made on my initial bargain to send the blooming thing back to them.

Still, hopefully that will bring this sad little story to a close, and I shall never speak of it again. Probably. Ultimately it’s not really their fault that their dispatches can get lost in some mysterious void for a fortnight or more, but the almighty amount of irritation and bother involved has been a wearisome and tiring experience.

For all of us.

Ah well, on statistically the most miserable day of the year, I was bound to have a bit of a moan. I guess with me it was kind of inevitable.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll tell you a happy story involving a frog…

TO HAVE NOT

As of yesterday, one of the “small parcels” that I was telling you about last week still hadn’t popped through our letterbox here in the ravaged outer wastelands of Lesser Blogfordshire, and as it was now eight days beyond it’s “estimated delivery date” and because I couldn’t find any policy document on their website with regards to how long I should wait before reporting it as “missing in action”, I decided to try and tell my supplier about the fact that it seemed to have gone missing.

It does, after all state quite clearly on their website that “If your order hasn't arrived after the estimated delivery date, please contact us and we'll do our best to locate it” so I was only doing what I was told to do.

Anyway, I plunged on through the murky forest of words that made up the lesser used corners of their website and you would not believe how difficult they are making it for you to suggest such a thing. It’s almost as if they find it impossible to imagine that any of their parcels could possibly go missing under any circumstances.

You are given options to return things, you are given options to explain things that have been wrongly delivered, and you are even given options to comment on the packaging of your item, but the non-arrival of your precious order doesn’t appear to exist as an alternative.

“Once an item goes out the door and onto the back of a (whichever postal carrier you use) wagon, then it ceases to be ‘our problem’” was something I read on a forum allegedly written by one of their presumably more enlightened and helpful ex-employees. (Ahem!) When I read that, I thought that it was a rather depressing attitude for someone in such a business to have had, but now, after my fruitless searches through their website, I’m starting to believe that it may well have been their company mantra.

The only option I could find under the snappily titled “Where’s my stuff?” area was an option to email (or phone, but I really wasn’t in the mood to talk to one of these people) so I started to do that when BAM!!! there was a sudden and unexpected power outage of the sort we get out here in the hinterlands every so often, which cut out the computer, the hub and the lights for just about long enough for me to have to reset every timer in the house.

The “broadband” light on the hub steadfastly refused to come back on for what seemed like an age, and I did wonder whether the internet gods were trying to tell me not to bother. “Everything’s fine” they were whispering suggestively “It’ll turn up tomorrow. You know there are problems at the distribution depots. You saw it on the local news…”

I saw the logic of this, of course, but then wondered why everything that I’d ordered after it had already arrived, so, once the light finally chose to illuminate itself once more, I ploughed on, and composed a terribly polite email and clicked “send”. I can’t bring myself to do stern and miffed even when I’m feeling stern and miffed. I suspect you can only tell whether I’m really fed up with you if I start being terribly nice to you. This may well be a social flaw and might explain a heck of a lot of things that have happened to me in my personal relationships over the years.

I did get a terribly helpful reply, though, and a replacement copy is now streaking towards me by first class post, which means I will no doubt end up with a Double Bogie (2 over par sounds about right) by the end of the week and end up with the magnificent faff of trying to get my head around the returns system, which just goes to prove how very hard it is to keep a customer satisfied.

It’s all just a little bit sad really, as there was a perfect free slot on Sunday evening that an old Humphrey Bogart movie would have slipped very comfortably into. Okay, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not really something to be sad about, but I’m sure you understand what I mean.

I’m also not so far gone yet that I don’t recognise the irony in having to wait for a title called “To Have and Have Not”. I do indeed, at this precise moment “Have Not” and I was beginning to suspect that I was unlikely to “Have” for the foreseeable future, until my own intervention. Perhaps Bogie has been taken in for questioning by the authorities as one of the “usual suspects”, but that would be the wrong film, and indeed that is one that I happily “Have”. Hopefully, as he wallows forlornly in his cell, he’s aware that I’m on the outside trying to get him free.

I do hope so.

*  *  *  *  *

In this spirit of “following up” on previous blog postings, I shall return (briefly) to matters of toast. Due to stocking issues, my local supermarket didn’t have any Warburton’s Farmhouse loaves at the weekend, so now my toast is having to be made using another bakery’s version.

Bah!

It’s really not the same.

I’m sorry if that might upset the hard working and lovely people at A.N. Other’s bakery, but I seem to have a very sensitive (or fussy) palette when it comes to these things. The really strange thing is that even I thought that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so it just goes to show how discerning and rather extraordinary the human body can be, even one as raddled as mine is.

SMALL PARCELS OF ANXIETY

I’m waiting for four parcels at the moment, five if you count one that the beloved has ordered which still hasn’t been delivered, and six if you include another CD order I made yesterday, although that’s not been dispatched yet, so it probably doesn’t count. On some basic level I do look forward to the arrival of Barry the Postie and the soft clatter of the letterbox as another packet is pushed through. Equally, there is also the nagging irritation when something doesn’t actually appear on its estimated delivery date, and that slight trickle of worry that tends to grow and grow as the days without its arrival stretch into a week or more.

Has it been stolen? Has it been delivered to one of the nearby houses which is sometimes empty during the week? Or delivered to the wrong address where perhaps someone dishonest lives? Why do I have to wait a full 28 days before I can inform the supplier that it’s gone missing? If I do report it missing, will it then turn up the very next day and make me look like a neurotic, impatient idiot? Have they chosen to dispatch it with some other, lesser, carrier whose delivery staff sneak up to the front door like ninjas and slip away having left a “missed delivery” card but no actual parcel? Why, oh why does the mail delivery system sometimes seem so random, with some things arriving the very next day after I order them and others hanging around in some mysterious parcel limbo for weeks at a time after I get my dispatch note?

Since Christmas I have ordered stupendous (well, relatively speaking) quantities of cheap tat (mostly books that I “just fancy” reading - hence the house full of books we have), possibly trying in some small way to cheer myself up. I’m told I compensate for my miseries by ordering these kinds of things and that, as we do already have a house full to bursting point with such tat, I really shouldn’t be ordering any more of it, but then I still go off and do so anyway.

I’m weak.

I’m feeble.

I admit it, but then I can’t ever resist a good bargain and I always justify it to my conscience by telling myself that I do wait for the price to drop to what I think that it’s reasonable to pay.

It’s the online sales that normally do for me, that and the fact that I’m suddenly free of the zone. The zone is that period of the year after the beloved has started to buy her gifts for me – be it for birthday or Christmas - until the celebration day itself. During that time I am not allowed to buy myself anything at all – with the odd exception (and the odd pre-order that is due out after the date is also allowed) - for fear of duplication.

I’m also told that all this personal shopping diminishes the value of the gifts I receive, especially if I’m receiving parcels I’ve bought for myself nearly every single week of the year, and this means that I don't get the benefit of the things that I do receive as loving, thoughtful gifts.

Ah! The perils of being a collector… and a completist.

I wonder whether it’s all because I really need something to look forward to, and that momentary feeling of excitement as I rush to the door after Barry’s done his letterbox thing is ever-so-slightly addictive? Or maybe I like to punish myself with a slight disappointment when I go down the stairs only to find that whatever I was expecting is still not lying on the doormat.

“So what is all this tat he’s expecting so eagerly?” I hear you possibly not cry. Well, you’ll probably think it’s a load of old rubbish, but it interests me, which I suppose is the nature of these things. The first I actually ordered quite a bit before Christmas, when I was firmly in the zone and it was therefore a wicked thing to do, although I convinced myself that the title was so obscure that the beloved was unlikely to have ever heard of it. It was a book called Second Thoughts, the second volume of Colin Baker’s – the multi-coloured shouty Dr. Who from the mid-1980s - articles for the Bucks Free Press. Towards the end of last Autumn I’d read his first volume after it was recommended to me, and I really liked it, being as it was a little bit like a blog – a smorgasbord of articles on various topics – but in book form. I didn’t know at the time that there was a second volume, so when I spotted it online my finger only hesitated for a moment before clicking to reflect on my zonal state before ordering, although it has taken rather a long time for the shop I used to get it back into stock, which is why I’m still waiting.

Ah online shopping! Too easy to click. Too easy to spend those pennies when it all seems so very virtual. Too alarming when the credit card bill arrives. I have a friend who doesn’t like online shopping because of the delay involved. They prefer the instant gratification of going into a shop, buying something and having it in their hands and available to them straight away, but I think I prefer the deferment, the thinking time, the pause to reflect and punish myself for my own weakness.

The second expected parcel is The Bogart and Bacall Signature Collection on DVD, the only one of those collections it seems that wasn’t on sale in Sainsbury’s just before Christmas and the only one I really wanted. To be fair, I’ve already got two of the rather brilliant films in this set on disc, Key Largo and The Big Sleep (in fact I only watched The Big Sleep on my “day off” last week) but this seems to be the only way you can get hold of To Have and Have Not on disc in the UK at the moment, and the set was cheap enough for me to justify it, and I get Dark Passage as a kind of bonus, too.

I just love those old Humphrey Bogart films!

Another DVD and an Audiobook make up the third and fourth. Optical media! Don’t you just love it? For me, you can keep your downloads and your “clouds”, I need to hold that physical object in my grubby paw! If it’s too virtual, I fear it might just slip away from me. I’m so old-school, so analogue that it probably hurts your brain just to think about it! I’ve not even considered moving to Blu-ray yet (Another format to fork out for?! Please, no…) and our telly is still reassuringly bulky, has a cathode ray tube somewhere within and is curvy of glass at the screen end, although it isn’t in a wooden cabinet, so I have embraced modernity in some ways. I even watched something from a Videotape last week, but I honestly don’t have any wax cylinders which I keep my audio collection on, although I do still have a sneaking desire to acquire a new turntable to play my old LPs on, even though when Pete Townsend’s White City Album finally made it on to CD, it did rather put a dent in that argument.

Oh, and the beloved awaits another new bag. She has many bags, but I can hardly be critical now, can I?

Not with all the tat I’m expecting.