Royal Mail confused for d-i-y label printing

I tend to save the .pdf rather tan printing direct from the web page

RM is still playing catch-up from decades of their Luddite staff refusing to accept better technology.

That us exactly what I did. It said it had sent me an e-mail with the label, but it never arrived. Printing direct the previous time worked fine, but not this time.

Correction: The e-mail massage arrived later, I see. Better late than never.

Not only Luddite staff. Also some very bizarre working practices. Our village has two postboxes. One has always had its collection early in the morning, which means everything posted after breakfast time has to wait until the following day to *begin* its journey to the sorting office and then the recipient.

The other postbox has recently changed from late-afternoon to early-morning collection.

I was bemoaning this to the postman and he said that he is responsible for emptying *one* of the two boxes just before or just after he does the delivery round to the village, so even though the box says "Last collection: 9 AM" it's actually around lunchtime or early afternoon.

But he said that RM send out a different postman from about 20 miles away to empty the other box, instead of the same person emptying box boxes in succession. One box's mail goes to our local sorting office, about 8 miles away; the other box's mail goes to a different sorting office about 40 miles away. Work out the "logic" in that...

You've then got the idiocy of a sorting office which is staffed all the time that outgoing mail is arriving there from postboxes and all the time that incoming mail is being prepared for the postmen to deliver it, but the counter where you can collect mail that needs a surcharge or which is too big to fit through the letter box or needs a recipient's signature is only staffed for a few hours on a few days of the week.

The RM one I have to use if I get carded is a complete PITA. It's open weekdays but on giving the staff the card they will disappear into the depths of their warehouse for at least 5 minutes to retrieve the item. Come Xmas time when there is a long queue outside of the building you better bring a tent and provisions for a couple of hours.

Are they by any chance in different postcodes?

If you're on the edge of postcode zones then mail can end up in different sorting offices depending on which side of the 'watershed' it falls.

eg around here the boundaries of CB, PE, SG and MK aren't too far apart. So there are places where one road is CB and the next is PE, or similar. If you post a letter in one box it goes to Cambridge, in another a mile away it goes to Peterborough. Similarly the delivery rounds are organised out of those depots.

No doubt in more sparsely populated areas the boundary between different sorting offices in the same postcode zone can be similar - eg one road is in XY12 and the next is in XY22, with the two offices being in different towns far apart.

The boundary has to go *somewhere*, and that somewhere gets the (literal) edge cases.

Theo

That happens round here is Surrey. 1 box has a GU postcode and the others a KT one. Where the box is outside what used to be a sub-post office, it gets more collections than random ones around the village.

Recently I bought some online postage for a letter for the first time. It was far from smooth.

The resulting label barely fitted the envelope.

A post worker visited me to collect the letter, although I had posted it the day before. Seems unwanted collections are common.

No. The postcodes differ only in the final character: they are of the form AB12 3AA and AB12 3AB (fictitious example - not an Aberdeen postcode!) I wonder how many different postcodes our village has: probably not many. .

Although you'd expect that boundaries would be drawn so as to go through sparsely populated areas. Not that this seems to apply in some cases: you get roads where one side is in county council and the other is in another, and so their rubbish collections are on different days and in some cases children have to go to different schools. Would it have hurt to move the boundaries as new estates were built, so the whole of a community is still in the same council.

For may years there was reluctance to accept sorting mechanisation and the introduction of part time labour, which tended to be female. In the 1980s I went on a visit to the Campbell Street sorting office in Leicester, where at one end of the sorting floor the part time women were entering post codes on the letters that passed before them (remember the phosphor dots that used to be a feature of envelopes that had been through the mechanised sorting process?) and at the other full time men were doing manual sorting. A few years later I met an RM official who lived not far from me at an RM event and mentioned what I had seen. "Oh, yes." he said, "I used to work there and it was just like that." (There were unconfirmed stories that in some sorting offices there were rooms full of unused machinery that had been there for years.)

I used to drink in a pub where a few posties and sorting office staff used to drink after (or during) their shift. They gleefully told stories about how they used to sabotage any effort to change old working practices.

Snap. Currently and for another week or so with on-line purchase of postage they are offering a promotional free doorstep collection . This free collection is their default option setting and it's not particularly obvious that is has been applied until you get to the final payment stage and not particularly obvious where you can turn this option off.

I printed my label out and put the letter in the nearest postbox.

The next day I had someone turn up to collect the letter :) The letter had actually been delivered to the recipient before the RM staff had come to my door to collect it.

I'm not going to wait in all day in the hope someone is going to turn up to collect a letter when it's bad enough waiting in for a semi important item delivery that their tracking say will be delivered in the morning and then changed to the afternoon and then before 7pm.

I believe the Royal Mail (or is it the Post Office) is offering to collect packages and letters free of charge if you bought postage online.

This seems to be only until August, as some sort of promotion.

The dates seem to vary according to the product you choose to use. Parcel collection is only free until Friday this week.

I would agree with that, it takes three days to deliver free first class mail half a mile up the road cos it has to go miles away to be sorted. Logic? Pah. Brian