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