Third class post

Anyone else despair about the state of the poor old Royal Mail? There seems to be a concerted Government and management policy of destroying it and flogging off the carcass to German or Dutch carpetbaggers.

Someone sent me a tiny brass tube by post, the weight was negligible, it was in a standard DL envelope and had a first class stamp but was fractionally - and we are talking 2mm here, too wide.

So despite being well within the length, width and weight it was reclassified as second class and classed as a large letter - remember we are talking 2mm here - which meant it was still 8p light on postage.

Now if you are going to lumber the public with a system which seems to have been designed to confuse pensioners by an accountant with no friends you would have thought someone with a working brain might have worked out that if the first class small letter postage cost was the same as the minmum second class large letter postage cost - and so on up the scale, first the same as second on the next level up - it would save a lot of problems.

It would just mean a marginal oversize item would drop from first to second class but no that is far too simple. So I am charged 8p but not only that, because the Royal Mail management will not insure postmen to carry money, they cannot collect the 8p so they have to pop a card through your letterbox to tell you they can't deliver an item because you owe postage.

So you have to collect from the sorting office where you are also fined £1 - they call it an admin charge - for collecting a letter someone had actually paid to have delivered.

The people taking the flak for that at the sorting office of course are the postmen , who are also blamed for all the other ills of the creaking service. No wonder they are also going on strike at regular intervals which rather than militant posties in this case tends to point to incompetent management with an agenda to sell the whole shooting match off. Tradition and history mean nothing when there is a few bob to be made and a few palms to be greased.

I am old enough to remember a postcard posted in the morning being delivered in the afternoon in the days when there was no first and second class post just a pride in delivering as fast as possible.

The current management, who decided people don't want an early morning delivery, hardly seemed worried whether mail is delivered at all just as long as their political masters are happy and the seven figure salaries keep rolling in.