Monday 15 September 2008

The Glamour of the Post Office Queue

There was a time, when if you timed it right, the Post Office queues were relatively short. Oh, how times have changed!

Many smaller Sub-post offices have now closed in a UK Country wide cost cutting exercise. The Post Office now offer more products and services than any ever before in order to try and make a profit. Well... you can't blame them, they are a business after all.

But where does that leave the queuing customer? Well, to start off with, about half an hour away. It's now 1 queue for everything it seems, many queues merged into one, a single Post Office now serving a much greater number of people... or trying to.

I stand in the queue with my three parcels. I am behind Pensioners collecting their Pension, Driving License renewals, Fishing License applications, Stamp buyers, Passport applications, a complaint about Internet Broadband, some one with thee bags of parcels, somebody wanting Foreign currency, Parcel Collectors, and the list goes on.

20 minutes in, a Pensioner (male) taps me on the shoulder. "If it weren't for people like you, we'd get served in half the time."

Excellent. If he hadn't of been 302 years old, I would have punched him on the nose. To weigh and stamp three parcels doesn't take any time at all. I could have countered, "If all Pensioners had their Pension paid directly into their Bank Account, other queuers wouldn't be quite so harassed all the time." But what would have been the point? I still would have had to stand next to the chap for the next 10minutes and one gets the feeling he would have got worse.

It's all now a question of patience of course. Some people just have a lot more than others.



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