Mailman, bring me no more blues<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Most people are delighted to receive mail from
\nhome. Even if it takes some time to get here!<\/p>\n
I am no exception, but when Pos Indonesia sent me one of those
\nlittle chits asking me to go to them to pick up mail I wondered
\naloud. Would this be recent mail or not? You see, I have little
\nfaith in the company's workings for it once took them 14 months
\nto deliver a package to me. As it turned out it was recent mail
\nbut much too late to matter, items for the English FA Cup Final,
\nalmost three weeks late, among other things.<\/p>\n
It was the other things that I was most interested in. And so
\napparently was Pos Indonesia. They handed over the package inside
\na sealed plastic bag of theirs and I was immediately wary of
\nskullduggery. True enough, they had indeed opened the package to
\nhave a look, doubtless in the hope that they would find salacious
\nmaterial. (Aren't all Europeans porn freaks?!) There was no
\nexplanatory note, either in Bahasa Indonesia or in English, no
\nexculpatory offering suggesting that the item had been damaged in
\ntransit. I worked two years for the post office in the UK and
\nknow fine well it is standard practice to provide the customer
\nwith an explanation for damage.<\/p>\n
Two years ago in April I received a phone call from home to
\ntell me that my Christmas mail had arrived. I was momentarily
\nrelieved until my father informed me that it was the mail that
\nthey had sent me. It had come all the way to Indonesia and had
\nbeen sent back. I had no recollection whatsoever of having been
\nasked by Pos Indonesia to go round and pick it up.<\/p>\n
So what has privatization, that so-called panacea for all
\nills, done for the Indonesian postal service? Precious little, it
\nwould seem. The same old cavalier attitude to delivery and
\nprivacy exists. The new broom is hairless and has not swept away
\nthe old dust. All that has happened is that some canny
\nentrepreneur is making money out of shoddy business.<\/p>\n
Privatize! Privatize ! Privatize! The din of this slogan is
\nunavoidable. But all we too often get is a mess of potage. Pos
\nIndonesia is not alone. Take Richard Branson's \"Virgin Trains\"
\nwhich operates the rail service into England's northwest and to
\nGlasgow. Last year it was shown that its punctuality record was
\nworse than British Rail's had been. \"We're trying. We'll get
\nthere,\" Branson's spokesman bleated. Very trying, I'd say. All
\nthat they can come up with is pompous station officials decked
\nout in company colors.<\/p>\n
Privatization has carved up the railways in Britain into a
\nwelter of companies running different parts of the service and
\nwhen I went to the local station to inquire about a journey to
\nGdansk in Poland by rail I was told \"We don't do European
\ninformation\".<\/p>\n
Pardon me, but I also once worked for British Rail and can
\nremember the time when booking office clerks knew every shunting
\nyard from Aberdeen to Istanbul. Finding out how to get from point
\nX in Cumbria to point Y in Umbria was no sweat. But, would you
\nbelieve, 13 phone calls later I still did not have the
\ninformation I required and in the end I flew to Warsaw and took
\nthe train up to the Baltic coast from there.<\/p>\n
So, anyway, back to Pos Indonesia. Will they furnish me with
\nan explanation as to why they took such an interest in the
\ncontents of my mail? Will porkers fly? Does the sun rise in the
\nnorth? Service is hardly their strong suit any more than it was
\nthe forte of private airlines like Sempati, which once
\ninexplicably shunted me and 50 other passengers three times
\nbetween the international and domestic terminals at Soekarno-
\nHatta Airport before loading us on a plane that had been there
\nall along.<\/p>\n
-- David Jardine<\/p>", "url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/mailman-bring-me-no-more-blues-1447893297", "image": "" }, "sponsor": "Okusi Associates", "sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com" }