Dispatches: Re-delivering the Post (Channel 4 tonight)

this was fucking great! i mean, it was really bad, the stuff that was happening, but i couldn't take my eyes/ears off it. about 10% of the stuff we send from work never gets there and now i know why... dude from brixton depot: "leave it in the alleyway"! the guy just throwing it on the floor! the fuckers pinching stuff out of what were obviously birthday and christmas cards! (you cunts) and the thing about recorded delivery not being guaranteed to get there - i hate this - the guy in the post office in brixton last week (all the people that work in this post office seem to be great actually, i think all the bad shit there is behind the scenes) took great pains to explain to me that sending something recorded delivery was not enough to guarantee it would get there, all it meant was that if it *did* get there, it would get a signature, and if i wanted to guarantee it would get there i would have to send it special delivery, which is four quid as opposed to 66p... he looked at me like "well, on your own head be it" when i said i still wanted to send it recorded, but that one got there fine, as did the one i sent on weds. the compensation thing is fucked too, that's a total scam and i hate them for it. bring on the competition and the downfall of "royal" mail yeah!

the way the voiceover guy kept saying "rorl" for "royal" got on my nerves though.

I saw the earlier show, but missed this one because I was watching MATH GEEKS VS. THE MOB about the card-counting MIT students who took on Las Vegas. That was great.

they had cctv footage of a postal worker standing on a street corner shuffling a huge pile of credit cards he'd filched, and sitting in a car going through a bigger pile of cheque books (this cheque book thing happened to our russian! i think they made out cheques for £3000 altogether, the bank are being absolute swine about it OF COURSE but i think it is gradually getting sorted). OBVIOUSLY cards and chequebooks shouldn't be sent via royal mail, get them sent to your local branch and pick them up... there was an undercover reporter who just showed up at an agency and got given work straight away, no police check no nothing, they skipped the three weeks training cos she wasn't a royal mail employee, gave her 4 mins training then sent her out on what is apparently one of the most complicated walks - with no map! (poor sods, no wonder they just chuck it on the floor. errr, no.) i missed the earlier doc but was that where they had the sacks of post that had just been slung in the river in the oxford post strike, or was it an oxford-er who told me about that irl? it's like david shrigley that bit.

i am in the middle of a long and protracted battle with the royal mail over their total fucking inability to do what they're meant to do, ie deliver my fucking post.

apparently my mail is now being monitored for two weeks. the other day i came home to find letters for a house round the corner through my door. this was the final straw for me; fortunately it also seems to have been the final straw for the customer-service guy i'm dealing with, who is now kicking off in a variety of directions on my behalf (having previously been slightly dismissive).

i cannot begin to articulate how much i loathe and despise the royal mail; how absolutely piss-poor their service seems to have become here in glasgow in the past two years. dmun drive-in: share your stories. what's the royal mail like to work for? why does it seem to be full of tools and tossbags?

my dad, btw, went to postwatch, the regulators, after similar problems with his mail in england and then in scotland after he moved back up. they were about as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

There was a periodm about a year or so ago where I was finding the postal service to be noticeably worse in London but it seems to have improved again more recently.

simon, it's the same all over the country. whole thing is collapsing, i think no one there gives a fuck because really, if people don't want to send stuff through regular royal mail, what are their options? pay special delivery charges? fine, that's four quid more per package for them and they can usually (tho on several occasions they've lost our special delivery stuff too) cope with actually getting the thing there (note: THIS IS THE SERVICE WE SHOULD BE GETTING ON THE MOST BASIC LEVEL, FUCKERZ) am sure it's not *that* much more work - but dmun might know better?
use dhl/other couriers? yeah right. they got us over a barrel. we just have to put up with it. them providing a better service won't make more people use them, or make them a bigger profit, so why bother? i do have hopes for when it's opened up to competition (january 2006 i think they said)? vast, vast numbers of people will surely switch - to ANYONE else - and they'll be forced to buck their ideas up. or they could just roll over and give up completely i guess, and all their previous employees will move to the new provider and nothing will change.
how much do the people in charge of royal mail get paid? bonuses?

NATIONALISE THE FUCKER - IT USED TO FUCKING WORK!

this is the original message i sent to the royal mail in may, using their ludicrous online form thing (under the heading "how can we help?")

the irony is it didn't get there. it arrived as a null document. it took them two weeks to tell me this. luckily i'd kept a copy.

anyway. share my pain.

(i didn't see dispatches, sadly. i was at the gym. bugger.)

"How can we help?"

Well, you could try delivering my mail. But that seems to be beyond you.

The non-delivery of my polling card for today's general election was the final straw. I know I'm not an isolated case - I refer you to page nine of today's Herald newspaper - but I still can't let the matter drop. How on *earth* have your standards fallen so low that you are unable to deliver a polling card before the day of an election?

Your area general manager for Royal Mail in the West of Scotland, Andrew Wood, is quoted in The Herald as saying: "With our robust planning and dedicated teams we have done the job well and all cards have been delivered. The only cards Royal Mail has [left over] are ones marked 'gone away' or with no addresses on, which suggests possible inaccuracies with the electoral register and/or printers."

So where's mine? Where's my partner's? Does Mr Wood really expect me to believe that both our cards have been affected by mysterious printing errors? Perhaps it was a printing error that led my partner's birthday present from my parents to go missing last year. Or that, earlier this year, led to tickets for a concert being delivered the day *after* the concert had taken place. (Luckily the venue were very understanding. It happens all the time, they said. You can't trust the post any more.)

The Royal Mail, quite frankly, is a bad joke. Luckily, in an age of electronic communication, I don't have to use you much myself; when I *do* need something to be delivered, I tend to pay for a reliable courier service. But unfortunately some poor, misguided souls insist on trying to use you to deliver stuff to me. Your one-delivery-a-day system has been the final nail in the coffin: because we live in a tenement block - like millions of others in Glasgow - the poor, hapless postie often can't get in when he turns up at 11am or 1pm or whenever, meaning what little mail does actually arrive tends to come in clusters, two or three days late.

Quite what I hope this e-mail to achieve, I don't know. You're beyond hope. Still. At least I've got it off my chest. And at least I can be sure this particular missive will actually arrive.

I didn't think it was the Royal Mail that delivered polling cards. When I lived in Stoke Newington I rang the council to complain I'd never received one and they said "Oh yeah - sorry. The company we hired to deliver them just dumped loads on some wasteground and there was no time to issue duplicates".

(NB. to anyone who doesn't know, you don't actually need to have a polling card to vote. As long as you're registered and know where your polling station is, just turn up with ID)

oh, i know all that. usually i've lost my polling card myself, long before voting day. i was just so pissed off that the RM fucked up.

perhaps that's why there never used to be a problem: the RM weren't involved! but now they most definitely are.

Oh God, I've lost CDs, records, magazines, a cheque book. My flatmates have lost books, DVDs, a pair of shoes. I've had invoices go missing on the way out. It's fucking useless. Really fucking useless. We frequently get mail for the chemist downstairs, for other houses nearby and the chemist gets loads of our stuff. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would deliver the 12" mailer to the place all the other 12" records are going and the pharmacy catalogue TO THE FUCKING CHEMIST!

I have never knowingly lost anything in the post. I don't know if this is because I am lucky, oblivious, or just never send/get sent anything good.

i lost the entire run of 2000ad presents: Crisis comics! and the post in north ken was uber rub. we'd get stuff for other streets, "you were out" notices with no bell rung to check, stuff that never arrived.

Of course shows like this are designed to get us all excited about ID cards, you do know this people?

ID cards? They'll just get lost in the post.

Why do C4 want us to get excited about ID cards?

To make Big Brother more palatable, of course.

so they know who's watching

Please show card to screen to vote.

how does id cards make a load of incompetent fucknuts any less incompetent?

I've had loads of stuff nicked in the post in Muswell Hill. I get everything sent to my work now, although that didn't stop some cunt stealing £30 out of a registered delivery envelope someone sent me from Italy for an Ebay purchase. I put I DO NOT ACCEPT CASH in my Ebay listing for this very reason, but either he didn't understand it or didn't read it.

My wife won a competition on the artist Stephen Britt's website (she's a big fan) and he sent her a drawing as a prize. Guess what, didn't fucking turn up did it? She was gutted.

I have never seen people actively opening and stealing from mail, but i know a guy who was fired and who got 18 months in prison for stashing bags and bags of unopened letters and parcels in his shed just because he was too lazy to deliver it. Also i know of some postmen who rip the recorded delivery stickers off letters so they dont have to wait around at the property for a signature, and many postman would leave parcels on your doorstep, or bend "Please do not bend" letters rather than having to take them back to the office at the end of their round.

Most of the focus on the show was on temporary agency staff. We've had a few of these in the office i work in, and usually they receive hardly any training and end up working past their paid time, after getting lost several times and more than likely delivering mail through the wrong letterboxes. One guy last year was taking 6 hours to do a 3 hour round (though he may have been slow in the head as well as on his feet). Usually as soon as the agency staff get the hang of a round they will be moved onto a new one, and the process will start all over again.

I would say that cards are being opened and chequebooks are being stolen, it is likely to be someone in the sorting offices rather than the postman. The reason being that they handle mail for all over the country rather than a focused area, and so there is much less chance of them ever being caught.

All in all i thought it was a good show, that has since got me a lot more grief from angry customers who watched it and now come out to have a moan themselves.

i think that there might be a problem insofar as with the drive to slash costs (thanks adam crozier, the boy dun good), there has been a general trend towards replacing full time workers with temp staff. is this true dmun druve in? it seems that there are often a lot of jobs going thru temp agencies for post workers at any rate. if this theory is correct then i think it to some extent explains the erosion of interest in the job (eg dumping whole sacks instead of delivering them) that inevitably temp workers are going to have as opposed to full time employees.

The mister used to be a postman many years ago. He's told me tales of "hidden" mailbags and people (both posties and sorting office staff) nicking money out of birthday cards. It does go on, or at least it used to.

dmun, I realise you are defending the honour of your profession, but how can you be so sure that posties up and down the country aren't nicking stuff/"forgetting" to deliver things? Also, are we meant to feel better that if it does go on (and it does) then at least it's not the good old postie? If it's just exclusive to the sorting office, then it's still the Royal Mail, innit?

Its not that i'm defending the honour of my profession (i have no desire to) and i realise that it is going on, i'm just saying that i havent seen it where i work. Then again, if a colleague was stealing i doubt they would be bragging about it round the office.

As for agency staff. Theyre just a cheaper option, who dont have the same rights (eg, paid sick leave/protected by the union) as permanent staff and are easier to mistreat and manipulate because they are usually ignorant of the correct procedures.