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…