Problems with the post

NORMALLY, we read about delays with the Spanish postal service, which admittedly isn’t the quickest in the world, but one of our readers in Malaga has been having trouble with the Royal Mail and has written to us about them.

Earlier this year, she and a neighbour had experienced difficulty in receiving mail from the UK and had complained to the Mail Centre in East Anglia but without any response. When back in the UK, she visited the local post office close to where she was staying but without result as they couldn’t find a phone number but, being resilient, found the number for herself and then called the mail centre who couldn’t help but referred her to the Plymouth office over 100 miles away.

After a number of false starts and lots of ‘muzak,’ she finally got through to a ‘very helpful’ young man who didn’t know why the letters addressed to Malaga were sent to Malaysia but he did explain that a postcode was just part of an address and not the secret to proper delivery.

Next she presented a claim to Royal Mail for lost or misdirected mail and has received a letter of apology explaining that the letters sent to Malaysia were incorrectly sorted and sent there due to human error whilst for the other problem, although she had the correct post code, the address referred to a lane rather than an avenue which, due to recent modernisation, meant that the Royal Mail could no longer rely on the postcode for deliveries.

To add to the fun, it was explained that since privatisation, Post Office Counters and Royal Mail don´t actually have access to each other’s complaints database.