I was in two minds as to whether to post this here or not, as its potentially quite boring and nothing to do with the NMA, or similar, but this is "everything else", and I have no where else to vent my spleen about this trifling matter.
My younger Son orders quite a fair bit from the tinternet. I give him a reasonable pocket money for which he does various tasks in the house , washing the pots on Sunday, bit of gardening, cleaning his own room etc, as I have always wanted him to appreciate his pocket money, and not take it for granted. As such, he is able to order from the net Games, CDs, DVDs, etc. That is to say, he gets a regular flow of jiffy bags landing on the door step.
A week or so ago it was his 17th birthday. As ever, many cards arrived that day. Two days later a Post Office card arrived for him through the door. It stated that their was a package for him, but the sender had not put enough stamps on it to be delivered, so he would have to pay the Post Office £1.09 to receive it. He was expecting a couple of DVDs he ordered, and expected it to be that. After the weekend, he went to our small local Post Office with the card. They did not know what the parcel was, where it was from etc. He would have to stick stamps to the value of £1.09 on the card, and send it off to the main depot, then his parcel / packet / what ever/ could be release. Nearly two weeks after his birthday, it arrived. It was a normal size envelope, bright blue with hand written address, Postage stamp, clearly a birthday card. On it, a sticker saying - deficient unpaid postage, 9p, handling fee £1.
So, I looked into the why of it, and it turns out, on the card a small plastic happy birthday badge was on the front. The badge made the letter 6mm wide instead of the allowed 5mm wide. So, nearly two weeks after his birthday, he got a birthday card, and a small badge to wear.
I know there are rules and regulations, and people sometimes need to make jobs for themselves, but 1mm difference on what was clearly a birthday card, not a large packed letter with plain envelope with typed address on it . You would hope there would be a small human choice element in the decision to hold the birthday card back to claim back 9p, but not so.So, I just had to say out loud, "what a load of bollocks".
Rant over.
As a topic, anyone else got an example of paper shuffler bureaucracy getting your goat??
