The term came into use in about the 1980s as a reference to the many postal
workers and former postal workers who rather suddenly began shooting up their
offices and co-workers (and often themselves in the end).
We, in the UK have nothing similar. Or at least we've had nothing similar
until now. Not quite as violent and deadly (we are, after all, a more civil and
peaceful society than our American cousins), but it could get so if the Royal
Mail (RM) continues on its current path.
Over here I apply the term to the customers of the RM's so-called Post
Offices. Customers who are faced with:
Ever increasingly long queues.
Ever decreasing numbers of employees.
Ever decreasing numbers of open windows.
Ever decreasing numbers of smaller Post Offices.
Ever increasing numbers of extraneous "services" offered
Ever increasingly complex/complicated methods of doing postal business.
Our so-called Post Offices are anything but Post Offices (PO). The closest
accurate term for them would be "General Stores". For example, in addition to
handling the mail and parcel post, our POs now:
Sell travel and car (and perhaps other forms of) insurance.
Sell telephone and Internet connectivity.
Sell Floral services.
Handle Passport applications.
Handle automobile taxes.
Handle currency exchanges.
Handle a wealth of banking services.
Handle benefits ("welfare" to our American cousins) and pension payments.
And the list goes on. Not to mention the fact that the employees have to
know how to fill out the various forms they help process, because, they stand
there and help fill out the forms for the customers.
Nowhere, in no country I've visited, the USA, France, Germany etc, is the
Post Office as inundated with non-postal services. But don't mention the
stupidity of the situation to postal employees because they've all been brain-
washed into believing that they have to handle these non-postal services or the
POs will go bankrupt.
They don't seem to understand that by sticking to Postal business, they'd
provide a quicker, more efficient service that the public would love and be
happier using.
And as if all those non-postal services weren't enough, the RM's Chief
Executive, Adam Crozier (the former Football Association chief executive) is an
over-paid fatcat who got a bonus of £57,400 at a time when the RM had made a
loss of £611 million and he had only done two months work.He also continues to:
close hundreds of (mostly) rural POs each year.
sack thousands of PO employees each year.
increase the price of postal "services" each year.
make increasingly difficult the process of posting mail (this year
implementing rates based not only on weight but on dimensions of the parcel).
make plans to close its final salary pension scheme to new entrants in a
bid to tackle its pensions deficit,
and continues, of course, to line his own pockets.
As the situation becomes increasingly intolerable for customers of the RM's
General Stores, one can imagine tens of thousands of other customers, in
addition to oneself Going Postal.
Perhaps Crozier should go back to the FA and his job should be awarded to
someone who actually knows something about postal business (like me) and who
wouldn't require so high a salary (like me, hell, I'll do the job for £20,000 a
year and not bonuses and produce a real postal system).
