Deliver us...
Feb. 18th, 2026 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI ordered a book last week. It was a Lent devotional, as a matter of fact, so I needed it to arrive before today. I thought I'd left plenty of time, especially since the company sent it off the day I ordered it; but when it still wasn't here yesterday, I checked my order online, saw that it had indeed been sent out the same day, and contacted the company to ask them to query it with Royal Mail.
Well. My regular postie, who is absolutely brilliant, is off work at the moment; I don't know if she's on holiday (if so, she certainly deserves it) or she's got one of the numerous bugs that are going round at the moment, but, in either case, she's not around. Therefore, there is a substitute; and this is pretty much always bad news.
According to Royal Mail, it turns out, this substitute "delivered" the parcel on Monday. I use inverted commas because the definition of "delivered", in this case, had been stretched well beyond belief. To cut a long story short, the substitute had a) failed to ring the buzzer (I was in all day Monday), and then b) left the parcel out in the open, next to someone else's wheelie bins. Not even our wheelie bins; ours serve the entire block of flats, so we have those large commercial/industrial bins. No. The parcel had been left by a set of regular domestic wheelie bins which was unidentifiable from the photo. Whoever owns the bins has not been round with it, but that is quite excusable, as the numbering on this street is rather bizarre to start with, and it's not at all obvious from the street that our block is the odd numbers n to n + 10 inclusive. (The intervening even numbers are nowhere near us.) So they probably have no idea where I am.
So at the moment I am talking to the company to see if they can get Royal Mail to find out exactly whose bins this parcel was left near, and, hopefully, actually deliver the blessed thing, which doesn't seem too much to ask; and in the meantime I'm very grateful that they're posting the first ten days online, so I'm getting that in my inbox. Hopefully I should receive the actual book before that finishes.
It's not just Royal Mail, of course. They're bad (other than Regular Postie), but they're certainly not uniquely bad. Failing to ring the buzzer is very common; they're in a hurry and they can't be bothered, especially not with flats. I had one courier who didn't bother ringing and left more than £50 worth of pergamentata sitting on top of the mail boxes at the front of the flats, in full view of the street, looking like the world's biggest Toblerone; had that gone missing I'd have been seriously annoyed. Perg isn't cheap anyway, and the delivery charge is pretty swingeing, because it comes in large sheets which they send rolled, and ironically they don't trust Royal Mail with that - they use a courier. Huh. Regular Postie would have rung the buzzer. Anyway, after I'd rung the company to find out why I'd just had an e-mail to say it had been delivered when nobody had rung the buzzer (and it wasn't outside the door of my flat, as I'd normally expect if someone thought I wasn't in), I discovered that that was what had happened and I was able to retrieve it. Still, it was very bad practice.
Once I had one who was actually dishonest. He thought he could get away with simply pretending to have delivered it; so I got the usual e-mail, couldn't find the parcel, and rang the delivery company. They rang the driver, who claimed to have been unable to get through the gate, so he had dropped the parcel behind the gate and gone on his way.
Nice try. The only thing is, we don't have a gate.
I informed the company of this. The person on the phone was clearly embarrassed, and assured me he would get back to the driver. About half an hour later, just when I was considering ringing them again to find out what was going on, the delinquent driver arrived with my parcel, rang the buzzer, and was duly let in.
"What was all this stuff about a gate?" I asked him.
He thrust the parcel into my hands. "Never mind," he said brusquely, "you've got it now." And off he stalked, clearly very annoyed with me for having deprived him of his plunder.
To my dying day I shall never know what he wanted with 3 kg of jute twine.
Well. My regular postie, who is absolutely brilliant, is off work at the moment; I don't know if she's on holiday (if so, she certainly deserves it) or she's got one of the numerous bugs that are going round at the moment, but, in either case, she's not around. Therefore, there is a substitute; and this is pretty much always bad news.
According to Royal Mail, it turns out, this substitute "delivered" the parcel on Monday. I use inverted commas because the definition of "delivered", in this case, had been stretched well beyond belief. To cut a long story short, the substitute had a) failed to ring the buzzer (I was in all day Monday), and then b) left the parcel out in the open, next to someone else's wheelie bins. Not even our wheelie bins; ours serve the entire block of flats, so we have those large commercial/industrial bins. No. The parcel had been left by a set of regular domestic wheelie bins which was unidentifiable from the photo. Whoever owns the bins has not been round with it, but that is quite excusable, as the numbering on this street is rather bizarre to start with, and it's not at all obvious from the street that our block is the odd numbers n to n + 10 inclusive. (The intervening even numbers are nowhere near us.) So they probably have no idea where I am.
So at the moment I am talking to the company to see if they can get Royal Mail to find out exactly whose bins this parcel was left near, and, hopefully, actually deliver the blessed thing, which doesn't seem too much to ask; and in the meantime I'm very grateful that they're posting the first ten days online, so I'm getting that in my inbox. Hopefully I should receive the actual book before that finishes.
It's not just Royal Mail, of course. They're bad (other than Regular Postie), but they're certainly not uniquely bad. Failing to ring the buzzer is very common; they're in a hurry and they can't be bothered, especially not with flats. I had one courier who didn't bother ringing and left more than £50 worth of pergamentata sitting on top of the mail boxes at the front of the flats, in full view of the street, looking like the world's biggest Toblerone; had that gone missing I'd have been seriously annoyed. Perg isn't cheap anyway, and the delivery charge is pretty swingeing, because it comes in large sheets which they send rolled, and ironically they don't trust Royal Mail with that - they use a courier. Huh. Regular Postie would have rung the buzzer. Anyway, after I'd rung the company to find out why I'd just had an e-mail to say it had been delivered when nobody had rung the buzzer (and it wasn't outside the door of my flat, as I'd normally expect if someone thought I wasn't in), I discovered that that was what had happened and I was able to retrieve it. Still, it was very bad practice.
Once I had one who was actually dishonest. He thought he could get away with simply pretending to have delivered it; so I got the usual e-mail, couldn't find the parcel, and rang the delivery company. They rang the driver, who claimed to have been unable to get through the gate, so he had dropped the parcel behind the gate and gone on his way.
Nice try. The only thing is, we don't have a gate.
I informed the company of this. The person on the phone was clearly embarrassed, and assured me he would get back to the driver. About half an hour later, just when I was considering ringing them again to find out what was going on, the delinquent driver arrived with my parcel, rang the buzzer, and was duly let in.
"What was all this stuff about a gate?" I asked him.
He thrust the parcel into my hands. "Never mind," he said brusquely, "you've got it now." And off he stalked, clearly very annoyed with me for having deprived him of his plunder.
To my dying day I shall never know what he wanted with 3 kg of jute twine.
