Note the date of this article. It has nothing to do with the 2022 strikes.
Over the last few weeks there have been reports that Royal Mail staff are threatening to go on strike over Christmas. There is one burning question in my mind on this if they do strike.
How would anyone bloody know?
Back in September, I purchased something from a seller on Amazon. It wasn’t fulfilled directly by Amazon, and the seller sent me emails with a delivery window. When the item didn’t arrive, they quickly sent me another, which arrived promptly. I told them I’d let them know if the first package arrived, but it never did.
We’re now well into November, and last week I got a card through my door telling me the Royal Mail had a delivery for me, but that it needed outstanding postage paying on it before they’d bring it. I had several parcels expected, so I paid the outstanding amount – a couple of quid – and waited to see who it was who’d messed up so I could claim it back from them (when you order through PayPal and Amazon, you have no worries on that score).
The delivery date Royal Mail had given me was a day last week, but by the day before that all the stuff I’d been expecting had arrived, and there was no indication or reference number that suggested any of those were involved. I was wondering what the hell it could be – I’d forgotten about the lost September delivery.
Come Saturday – and you can probably guess what’s coming – the September package was delivered! It was clearly dated September, but it had taken them until November to action it. A total of 50 days. I informed the Amazon seller, and they kindly told me to keep the second item as a goodwill gesture (so I got a spare of something I will almost certainly buy again at some point for a couple of quid when it normally costs ten times more).
But that’s not the point. The Royal Mail is likely to be hit by strikes for more pay by the arseholes responsible for things like this.
Items go missing on a fairly regular basis for me – I can count on a few a year for sure – and when I contact sellers it is always Royal Mail deliveries involved, and never couriers. You can be sure that I make my views on the Royal Mail well known at that point. What really bugs me, though, is the thought that at this time of year they take on a lot of temporary staff, many of whom couldn’t get jobs anywhere else, and with the occasional stories in the press where individuals have been either stealing or binning the post instead of delivering it… well, you have to wonder.
Then there was that time they suspended all deliveries on my road for a fortnight because a dog inside a house had barked at a postman (we’d assumed he’d been mauled and lost an arm or something until we spoke with the owner). The whole bloody street. We had to collect our mail from the sorting office. And what was funny was that the majority of the houses in the exclusion zone were further away from the one with the dog than all the ones round the back. It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover they’d also forbidden staff to even drive down the road.