Mailman, bring me no more blues

Mailman, bring me no more blues

JAKARTA (JP): Most people are delighted to receive mail from
home. Even if it takes some time to get here!

I am no exception, but when Pos Indonesia sent me one of those
little chits asking me to go to them to pick up mail I wondered
aloud. Would this be recent mail or not? You see, I have little
faith in the company's workings for it once took them 14 months
to deliver a package to me. As it turned out it was recent mail
but much too late to matter, items for the English FA Cup Final,
almost three weeks late, among other things.

It was the other things that I was most interested in. And so
apparently was Pos Indonesia. They handed over the package inside
a sealed plastic bag of theirs and I was immediately wary of
skullduggery. True enough, they had indeed opened the package to
have a look, doubtless in the hope that they would find salacious
material. (Aren't all Europeans porn freaks?!) There was no
explanatory note, either in Bahasa Indonesia or in English, no
exculpatory offering suggesting that the item had been damaged in
transit. I worked two years for the post office in the UK and
know fine well it is standard practice to provide the customer
with an explanation for damage.

Two years ago in April I received a phone call from home to
tell me that my Christmas mail had arrived. I was momentarily
relieved until my father informed me that it was the mail that
they had sent me. It had come all the way to Indonesia and had
been sent back. I had no recollection whatsoever of having been
asked by Pos Indonesia to go round and pick it up.

So what has privatization, that so-called panacea for all
ills, done for the Indonesian postal service? Precious little, it
would seem. The same old cavalier attitude to delivery and
privacy exists. The new broom is hairless and has not swept away
the old dust. All that has happened is that some canny
entrepreneur is making money out of shoddy business.

Privatize! Privatize ! Privatize! The din of this slogan is
unavoidable. But all we too often get is a mess of potage. Pos
Indonesia is not alone. Take Richard Branson's "Virgin Trains"
which operates the rail service into England's northwest and to
Glasgow. Last year it was shown that its punctuality record was
worse than British Rail's had been. "We're trying. We'll get
there," Branson's spokesman bleated. Very trying, I'd say. All
that they can come up with is pompous station officials decked
out in company colors.

Privatization has carved up the railways in Britain into a
welter of companies running different parts of the service and
when I went to the local station to inquire about a journey to
Gdansk in Poland by rail I was told "We don't do European
information".

Pardon me, but I also once worked for British Rail and can
remember the time when booking office clerks knew every shunting
yard from Aberdeen to Istanbul. Finding out how to get from point
X in Cumbria to point Y in Umbria was no sweat. But, would you
believe, 13 phone calls later I still did not have the
information I required and in the end I flew to Warsaw and took
the train up to the Baltic coast from there.

So, anyway, back to Pos Indonesia. Will they furnish me with
an explanation as to why they took such an interest in the
contents of my mail? Will porkers fly? Does the sun rise in the
north? Service is hardly their strong suit any more than it was
the forte of private airlines like Sempati, which once
inexplicably shunted me and 50 other passengers three times
between the international and domestic terminals at Soekarno-
Hatta Airport before loading us on a plane that had been there
all along.

-- David Jardine