“We are sorry for any inconvenience caused …..”

When I went through the rigmarole of changing my working week to a flexible one, I pictured Joseph and I doing fun “father-son” stuff in my new found spare time.

Unbeknownst to me, Royal Mail had other plans.

“No, no Sir, we don’t want you out playing with your son of an afternoon. No, we don’t want you taking him to the swimming pool any time soon. We feel it would be far more fun if you brought your son down to the collection office and stood in a queue in order to collect letters or packets that we deemed too big to take out in the first place. For an hour. Yours, with love; Royal Mail”.

For the 3rd time this week alone, I had to convince Joseph that the queue outside the collection office wasn’t boring and that I’m sure it would be something interesting this time.

Unsurprisingly, following the less than impressive collections earlier in the week, he took this statement with a pinch of salt, stopping short of calling me a ‘fibber’ outright.

The hour long wait wouldn’t have been so bad perhaps, if I hadn’t got to the front of the queue before watching the ……. gentleman, walk off with my form and then reappear 15 minutes later saying, “here’s a compensation form for you to fill in”. Those were his first words!

In other words, my package got lost somewhere between our postman trying to deliver it to me and bringing it back to the office.

How is that possible?

Their website proudly says, “see how you can get more from your mail with our range of services”.

Get more? How about pitching a tent outside the office and catch your mail going in rather than hope to see it arrive at your home? That’s one way of “getting more” from your postal service.

And is the name “Royal Mail” really justified?

What’s “Royal” about it? Would the Queen put up with it? I doubt it.

So, let’s ditch the ‘royal’ bit and use ‘average’ shall we?

On top of this, they haven’t ‘mailed’ me anything for a while; I’ve had to go and get everything myself so we can lose the ‘mail’ tag too. How about ‘collect’ instead?

I can see the new slogan now.

“Average Collect – we don’t go the extra mile”.