Royal Cock-up (Royal Mail)

Member Name: Pingu

Product:	Royal Mail
Date:	22/01/02 (632 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: They still hold a monopoly on letter post

I never really gave Royal Mail much thought before. They were just there. The words post and Royal Mail were synonymous. OK, occasionally it bugged me if I ordered something, paid for first class post, but still didn't get it for three days. By and large, though, I was neither happy nor unhappy with them - they were just there.

Recently, though, they've really started to bug me. First there is the unreliability. Things go missing quite frequently. And although I'm a firm believer in sod's law, I can't really believe that it's just my items that are singled out by the universe to go missing. If we assume that I am statistically normal then, in fact, everyone must be losing a similar percentage of their post, which is simply unacceptable.

Equally unreliable are delivery days. Our postman seems to simply not come some days - usually those on which I'm waiting in for something I've ordered and paid first-class postage for. Of course you're thinking maybe my item just hadn't arrived, and I had no other post, so the postman just went past my house. I'd like to think so, but asking people down the street, and on the estate, I can't find anyone who's had post on these days. It's gone on for months now. There seems to be one day in every week (other than Sunday obviously) when there simply is no post on our estate. I mean, have the bosses given them a five day week without telling the public or what? And when we are getting post it can be 7am one day and 2pm the next.

But my real niggle is that it's starting to cost me money to receive my post. On a very regular basis I'm getting slips saying the local post office is holding something because the postage on it was underpaid, and would I like to go and pay them to release it. Not only the shortfall of postage, but also a 50p handling charge slapped on it by the post office. When I get there I invariably find that it's a parcel or pa

cket, and that's the funny thing. With a parcel the person who posted it must have handed it over to be weighed, at their post office, paid whatever they were told it costed, and then never seen the parcel again. It's not like they could have just bunged a first class stamp on it and shoved it in a pillar box. So the underpayment is in fact entirely down to the mismatch of weighing scales at the two ends, and I am, in fact, paying for the incompetence of the post office. If it's a case of stamps somehow falling off somewhere I could understand, but one item was a book from Amazon, which simply said "postage paid" on the front, so how my local post office determined that it was underpaid I have no idea.

If there was any apology for any of this I would be happier, but Royal Mail employees still operate with a civil service attitude, and you'll get all the sympathy, and manners, shown by the average rhino.

Suffice it to say that the instant there are real contenders for every day post I will cease to use Royal Mail.

11/04/04 - I feel the need to rant again. We've recently acquired a new postman with all the restructuring of Royal Mail. I'm fairly sure he was simply dragged off the street and given a post bag without any training at all. He has never yet come before 2pm, although I'm sure I share that with many people now. But he also delivers our mail to the wrong address about 50% of the time, and gives us the stuff for people in the next street. Worst of all, though, is what he did if something wouldn't go through the letterbox. He simply left it on the front doorstep - rain, shine, floods, it didn't matter, he just left it there. He didn't even knock first to see if anyone was in. Frequently my wife was in when the post arrived, and was thus rather surprised to find a package on the doorstep when she went out later. And he didn't leave a card to say what he'd done. So if anyon
e had ever nicked one of these packages I would have been convinced it simply hadn't arrived.

I tried to lodge a complaint on the internet. After about 3 months I got an autoresponse addressed to a Miss Dyke, claiming they were looking into the matter. Since I'm Mr Mayson I was a little concerned that, just possibly, they hadn't a clue what they were doing. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Another two months later I got an e-mail saying, "We're sorry to hear about your difficulties. Hopefully you've now had a satisfactory answer from another source, but, if not, feel free to contact us again." Obviously my mistake was assuming that one complained about the Royal Mail through the Royal Mail complaints procedure, when in fact I was supposed to complain through my local fishmonger!!!

Eventually I solved the problem by catching the postman, one day when I was off work sick, and telling him how to do his job. He still doesn't knock, so EVERYTHING goes back to the depot. And he still doesn't leave a card, but the depot send very friendly reminders after a fortnight or so, asking if we're ever going to pick up our post that is sitting there...

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