I had to go to the post office today.
Which is generally an experience I try and avoid. (Similar to the way that I actively try and avoid hepatitis C)
South African post offices1 are especially grim, dystopian establishments, staffed by the walking dead and/or the Dementors of Azkaban2
[1] Imagine the postal service of Ankh-morpork (pre-Moist von Lipwig), only less efficient. (this might be gobbledygook to you)
[2] It’s interesting to theorize what you’re going to get once you finally get to the six inches of bullet proof glass (after you’ve solved the retractable-barrier maze) The service experience is markedly different, as you can probably imagine, depending on what you get.
A year ago (I don’t mean this in the vague passage of time sense, an actual year has passed) we sent a package. Under normal circumstances we would have used DHL or UPS… only for some reason someone3 in my company decided to load every chamber and then spun the chaos dial to see what would happen if we went all in on pandemonium. Enter stage left the South African Post Office.
[3] But apparently no-one.
Backstory. We had supplied a whole bunch of drivers for an LED lighting project. Even though the contractor had wired the whole thing incorrectly, which had blown the drivers, there were recriminations about whose fault this really was. And so I had to send some of the drivers to Italy to be tested, so that idiocy could indeed be check boxed on the official report.
These drivers have an a emergency lighting component which contained a battery which the post office decided they didn’t want to ship because of some sort of nebulous safety concern (a concern not shared by UPS) and our package was dutifully (and somewhat amazingly) returned to us two weeks later.
Today I got a mail to say I could collect my refund, in cash… because the horse drawn carriage carrying their new commodore 64’s broke down, or words to that effect, and they couldn’t do a transfer.
Standing in the queue I perused the prohibited goods poster. (nowhere I might add does it say anything about batteries).
In any event…
How often does it happen that people try to send leeches in the post that they have to specifically mention leeches? I worry about my countrymen.
Sometimes more than usual I mean.
Also I’m pretty sure this is denial of healthcare. As a counterpoint.
Go Darke 