You've Got Mail

You've got mail.... or maybe you haven't. I can remember a time, not so very long ago, when we used to get mail deliveries twice a day. The postman would bring the morning post at around 8.30am to 9.30am and then he would call again in the afternoon between 1.00pm and 3.00pm with the second post. That was the ‘norm’ ever since I was a child living with my parents. Just a few years ago though, that all changed. They scrapped the second post completely and left us with just one delivery per day which was usually brought between 9.00am and 11.00am. Royal Mail did reintroduce the second post over the Christmas period for a number of years though.

After all the complaints had died down and people were getting used to just receiving their mail once a day the Royal Mail revised their delivery schedules once again. This meant that we were no longer going to get our post in the morning. With their new cost-cutting measures they changed their postman’s rounds which saw the mail arriving at any time during the day up till around 1.00pm or 2.00pm. At one time we used to be able to wait until the postman has been before we went out, particularly if we were waiting for a package that may have been too large to fit through the letterbox, but doing so nowadays is no longer possible as we never know what time the postman is going to turn up.

If they are unable to deliver a parcel because there is no one home to receive it, there is a 48 hour wait before you can go and collect it at the sorting office. Three times now I have made a special trip to the sorting office to collect a parcel that I missed when the postman called, only to get back home and find a card pushed through my letterbox saying that they had tried to deliver a parcel while I was out.

You’d think that it couldn’t get any worse after all their cut-backs and reductions in service. Wrong! There has been no official statement from Royal Mail but I am convinced that the postman doesn’t deliver every day now. I’m sure they skip days. There’s been many times when I’ve been waiting for certain items to arrive and I’ve been watching out for the postman. Not only does my mail not arrive but there are no deliveries to the neighbours either, there’s no sign of the postman all day.

To make matters even worse, they're not bothered what time they deliver the mail now either. On Friday my post arrived at 6.30pm! And on top of all this the postal workers are constantly threatening to go on strike in protest of all the restructuring and cut-backs.

To be honest, I’ll be glad when Royal Mail is privatised, hopefully we’ll get a better service.