Gaaaaaargh!!! The object of today’s rant is none other than that best of British institutions, Royal Mail. Over the past few weeks, Royal mail have apparently managed to not deliver, or fail to deliver, several items. Now, it’s not the losing things that bothers me, really, what really bothers me is the attitude other companies have toward the Royal Mail service. Now, for a little backdrop to this rant then the story goes thus… Once upon a time there was a sleepy little country called England. The people paid their taxes to the government there, and in return got a state postal service. They paid their money for a stamp, which didn’t cost much, and they could be reasonable safe in the knowledge that their mail would get where it was going. So reliable was this service that companies, law firms and state departments and such would assume that if they posted something, then you received it.

Somewhere along the way, this all went horribly wrong. The government had local councils run by morons who spent all the tax money on cheerleading co-ordinators, team building sessions at Ski resorts, thousand pound lobster dinners and translating all the public service leaflets into Klingon and other some such unwanted nonsensical bullshit.

(And that’s another rant in and of itself…. Far be it for anyone to suggest the government should just pay for English classes for anyone wanting to be here, no no no. It’s far better to spend many times more than that in cost translating every pointless pamphlet in sight into every language known to man to protect peoples human right to aimlessly wandering round the UK not knowing how to speak English. Which, it has to be said, probably doesn’t happen anywhere NEAR enough to warrant all the millions spent on translations. The only time I’ve seen a foreigner who couldn’t speak any English at all they were also having a nice little chat with a police officer and colour me cynical but I’m not sure he was telling the truth about not understanding english.)

The end result is no money for a postal service. Then the government gets this idea that each of these services could make money, so they sell the Royal Mail to some big business guy who’s very good at making money for two camels and a bag of shiny coins. Big business guy decides he can make loads of money by adding to all the important and critical post the British are sending to each other (be that personal letters, legal paperwork or bills) some additional junk that nobody wants, but that other companies would love to shove through your door instead.

Now there’s two issues with this. The first is that the amount of post being sent trebles, most of it junk. Your poor postie is now struggling under the weight of a good number of bags and the logistics of getting both a postman and the letters to your door becomes a major operation. The other problem is that with more post being pushed through the same postal system there is more chance of losing mail altogether. That means your birthday cards and bills stand a much lower chance of getting to your door than they did.

This wouldn’t be the worst situation in the world if it wasn’t for the attitudes of many companies and public services. The attitude, one many will have encountered is “Well, we sent that out on xx date…..”. And? What the fuck does that mean? If I don’t recieve my post, I don’t recieve it. Unless companies are prepared to actually pay for tracked and recorded delivery to make sure their letters actually get to me, I don’t think I should be punished or held liable for them not arriving. In america if a legal firm wants to issue some kind of court papers then they seem to have to locate that person, confirm they are who they say they are and personally hand the papers over. Here it’s apparently enough to just pop them in the already overloaded postal service with no worries or cares as to whether it reaches it’s destination.

And in my mind, that’s just not good enough.