The Beginning of the End for Royal Mail

News that Amazon UK, the Royal Mail's second largest customer, has cancelled its contract with the service and that other large businesses are likely to follow, surely represents a watershed for the troubled postal service.

It's easy to blame those on strike for Amazon's wihdrawal, but the reality is that if you and I were faced with the probability of losing our jobs due to modernisation, we would take whatever action we felt necessary to protect ourselves and our families.

The chances that Amazon's defection (to the privately-owned Home Delivery Network) will cause Royal Mail bosses to concede to the demands of their striking postal workers are remote. The fact is that, while no-one in the Royal Mail wants to see the business collapse, those who will be most hurt if it happens will be the rank and file workers. Those at the top of the pile will walk way with their cash bonuses intact. In 2007, for instance, the then chief exectuiive of Royal Mail earned a £370,000 bonus in addition to his annual salary. Such is the so-called free market.

For an insight from the sorting office, check out this fascinating letter from a serving postman which challenges the often-heard claim that quantities of post in Royal Mail are down year on year.

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Rogue Postman in Westbury

Word from the letterbox is that a man is visiting business addresses in the Westbury on Trym area dressed as a postman and taking away the outbound post from the said businesses.

Trouble is, however, that this particular individual is not in fact a genuine postman. The counterfeit courier is after the goodies that are in local business mail outs.

I have not received any physical description of the malefic mailman. If you have seen him or can contribute to the knowledge base on this issue, leave a note via the comments tab.

Remember, real posties carry those beeping devices that scan the bar code on your mail room before they collect the post. So there.

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In Praise of the Post Office

A friend who lives in Westbury-on-Trym received a postcard this week from another mutual friend who is on holiday in Australia. Nothing unusual about that. The whole world seems to be visiting or emigrating to Australia and New Zealand at the moment.

The impressive part of the story is that the friend on holiday could not remember the address in Westbury when sending the postcard. Undaunted, and confident of the resourcefulness of the British Postal Service, she wrote the address as "Westbury on Trym, BS9, Bristol, England" and then drew a map of the friend's house. The diagram of Stoke Lane, Reedley Road and other unnamed streets did the trick. The postman worked it out and posted the card to the right house on the right street.

Marvellous.

National Prize Register - a Clever Use of a Comma

Despite having signed up several years ago with the Mail Preference Service, I still receive occasional junk mail. A recent example caught my eye and made me burst out laughing at the audacity of the company in question. If the writer were so inclined, he (or she) could be making a career as a writer or copy editor rather than a marketer of "prizes" from a spare room in Leeds.

After the initial greeting informing me that I was guaranteed to receive one of the following fantastic awards, the list of prizes was presented to me. The list, in handwritten font, was as follows. Please read it carefully, paying particular attention to the use of commas.

A cheque for £15,000, a Sony 42" Wide screen TV, £1,000 in cash, a Jeep, Omega or Rolex wristwatch, an Internet ready Dell laptop or £200 in cash.

Experience has shown that with such a list, the hapless recipient will always be given the cheapest prize. On this list, however, the cheapest prize appears to be an Omega wristwatch, available on eBay from £99 up. On closer examination, however, it is apparent that the cheapest gift is in fact a Jeep wristwatch, available on eBay from as low as £0.01.

The clever use of the comma is confirmed by the footnote at the bottom of the page which states that there are 100+ Jeep watches to be given away (in other words, about 50,000 of them) compared with one Rolex, one Omega and one cash prize of £15,000 (which has presumably already been awarded to a distant nephew in Ukraine).

To add insult to injury, the lucky winners of the Jeep wristwatch will be required to pay a £7.99 "insured delivery charge", a charge which for some reason is not required for those contestants lucky enough to win one of the five Dell laptops or the three £1000 prizes. This insurance cover is in addition to the cost of calling the 24-hour claim line: calls to the 0906 premium number cost £1.50 per minute and will last 6 minutes.

So, armed with this unmissable offer of spending £16.99 on a half-penny watch from the far east, I will be using my first class stamp (also requested by National Prize Register) to forward their letter to the relevant authorities in the hope that the owner may be encouraged to pursue an alternative career in the future.

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