Twoism

I miss the peace of fishing like when I was a boy.

- Marko Ramius, The Hunt for Red October

Captain Ramius was an old submarine commander who had spent too many years at sea waging a pointless and inglorious pseudo war to maintain the balance of power. This has next to nothing in common with what I'm about to say. I miss the peace of delivery on a Saturday morning. It's now eight months since the Delivery Methods Revision and this week marks five years since I started the job.

Saturday was the last remnant of the good days. On the other hand, everyone wanted Saturday off. Before Single Daily Delivery (SDD) came into effect in 2004, Saturdays were already single deliveries. Colleagues tell me they were off the street for 9am back then. With the change the company and the union agreed to maintain Saturday as a 'shorter attendance' by means of holding back specific bulk postings (Mailsort 3) till Monday. To further this it was also accepted policy to schedule meal relief (that is, your legally mandated break) at the end of your working hours thus bringing you off the street about thirty minutes earlier. Prior to the revision, in our area at least, this meant being off the street at roughly 1130 from an 0815 first letter time. The corporate mantra now is "Saturday is a normal working day", hence the finish time here is now 1410 in line with the rest of the week. Meal relief is now scheduled before delivery just like weekdays.

In a demonstration of how not like a normal working day Saturday is, plenty turn up early (whether paid to or not) and no-one takes their break for two reasons: it's Saturday, and the canteen is closed because it's a Saturday. In recognition of how no-one wants to be out there on a Saturday afternoon the later hours were to be compensated by an increase in Saturdays off. The old rotation pattern yielded one of any day off in six weeks (as we operated six days a week) and therefore the maximum number of Saturdays off was 1 in 6. The promise was a minimum of 1 in 4. We're still on 1 in 6. Unsurprisingly management has to beg people to work their long weekend and pay people to come in early so they can finish early so they won't cut off. There is one person, however, who is on 1 in 1 Saturdays off... the office manager who, like his predecessor, is only seen on the sixth day of the week if there's a scheduled conference call. Bonuses all round!

The earliest my driver and I can get out now on a Saturday is 0930. That's an hour earlier than scheduled and even then we're close to the last ones out the door. It's only a hour behind the old time but it noticeably changes the environment of delivery. Few people are up that early and if they are they're not out walking or driving, so the mornings used to be extremely peaceful. In deep winter it would still be dark and you'd gradually feel the sky lighten and the area begin to wake up until it was bustling as you finished your delivery. In summer you'd have the eerie calm of bright but nigh deserted streets - the occasional joggers, dog walkers and weekend paper boys and girls were the only other people revelling in the early sunshine. I get on well with my delivery partner, but I really do miss the solitude that was most prominent on Saturday mornings - I actually enjoyed it, bizarrely. Again, it's only an hour but it made it a different experience after all the weekday deliveries were pushed further and further into the afternoon.

That brings it's own problems because the summer sun is now our worst enemy. The last week of May was scorching, so of course the time of day you're warned to avoid by holiday reps are exactly the times we're out re-enacting the Bataan Death March. You don't have to tell me that's a gross exaggeration and denigrating to the people who went through that historical event, but find me someone else being paid to experience something close to it. I started packing a two litre bottle of ice water to prevent my legs cramping up at the end of four hours in the blazing sun. Yeah, show me how I'm supposed to plan my delivery to stay in the shade.

I've bitched and moaned about the revision - the crap that it brought and the sweeteners that never transpired. But one of the promises has actually come true. Before the revision planner ran off to destroy another office in November I requested a Light Weight Trolley to counter the excessive length of some of the back-and-front loops. Shockingly, nothing came of that and I eventually decided two months ago to ask a manager if I could take one of the many LWTs lying around not being used by walks as designated. I'm now a trailblazer for trolley use as I can happily collapse three bags together and go off on my own for up to ninety minutes. Small graces.

Do you remember the old days when Royal Mail provided multiple deliveries throughout the day? When the first delivery was before breakfast and you could communicate with someone and get a reply before the day was out? Of course not, Facebookandtwitter® didn't exist back then. If you do, you'll be dead soon so you don't matter. To think this was a service being operated in the Victorian era and now in the twenty first century you're lucky if you get your three Virgin Media leaflets before dinner. Modernisation is the tune we're dancing to and what have we got to show for it? A crappier service, because a service isn't a business, and we've got to be a business just like TNT and DHL and all the other small companies that took out a business loan to buy a sorting machine and can compete for contracts shouting from the rooftops: 'look at me, I have a postal licence'. Congratulations, you've completed the easy bit - now try and actually get them to the addresses. "Oh," but you say, "TNT are delivering letters in West London!". This is another of the easy bits and they say as much in their press release. Delivering to high density urban areas is extremely lucrative, now try the Outer Hebrides. They'll only touch that with the Royal Mail bargepole.

Privatised by the end of the current Parliament!

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