IIRC there are a few posties on here - interesting to see national media coverage of the postal issues.
We've had post 3 times in the last month, have had special delivery post not turn up and missed the response window on a speeding ticket.
It's obviously annoying for us, but interested in the other side of the coin. Can it really just be increased sickness that's brought the system to it's knees? How is it remedied?
Silver lining? Got a Xmas card today. That brightened my day.
Arriba is pretty close to the mark.
It’s been beyond Christmas level busy for the large majority of the time since March. Then we obviously had Christmas on top of that. Volume of mail in the system is at an all time high, as are levels of sick.
Now when Christmas arrives is usually a simple case of get temp/agency staff in. Now, in some cases the agency can’t fill the quota of staff needed. You have more work in the building taking up space plus social distancing measures so you don’t even have the room to add enough additional work areas to accommodate the extra work.
On top of that - a lot of the traffic is medium to large tracked items. These are a lot more labour intensive as they need to be scanned and sorted manually (as they are too big to go through the Parcel Sort Machine) And naturally take up more space.
Even if everything is processed. Delivery offices have stopped accepting mail as they have no room. Didcot & Wantage stopped taking mail over Christmas and Central Reading has stopped taking Large Letters.
Even once they get that far. You still need the space & staff to walk sort them for Delivery, which will be difficult. Next stage on and then the mail needs to fit in the posties van. Which won’t be huge capacity when you’re dealing with large tracked items.
I don’t work in Deliveries so I can’t say why you aren’t getting regular deliveries. I know at one point we were getting mail every other day but only letters once a week.
Now we appear to have a postie with a bigger hire van delivery parcels and another postie going round delivering letters.
Rightly or wrongly letters are way down on RMs priority, they make minimal profit and are relatively quick/easy to sort as a high percentage can go through the mech.
If the post you are expecting is mainly letters I can see why they aren’t getting delivered frequently.
If it’s everything then I can’t really offer anything not having anything to do with your local DO.
Special Deliveries should get through, that’s the whole point of them though. In the absolute worst case scenario they should only be a day late.
