Post office levy

I was on the point of writing to congratulate the Post Office on its vastly improved delivery service over the past year or so. Although letter mail from overseas still takes around 10 days to reach me, my newspaper from UK oddly enough only takes five to six days, due to the round about route that mail takes: airport to main post office, to South Jakarta post office, to Mampang post office and eventually to my office in the Landmark Center. Never mind, it gets here in the end.

However, my words of praise were aborted by the following quite unbelievable happening. On July 7, 1994, I got a note from the post office to say that I should collect a package. Accordingly, my wife went the next day to collect the package and was asked to pay Rp 29,678. This she duly paid, and took delivery of the package. Would any reader care to guess at the contents of that package that could possibly justify such a huge levy?

Let me tell you. It contained one privately commissioned (i.e. non-commercial, and certainly not pornographic!) video cassette about my old school in England (I had ordered it to see how things looked 60 years after I was a student there) and one "Old School Tie," the necktie for ex-students of the school (it's not even silk!). When my wife protested at this fantastic charge, the clerk muttered something about the computer classifying these as luxury items.

Nevertheless, although neither the tie nor the cassette could conceivably be classed as "luxury item" (the video cassette cost about eight Pounds = Rp 26,000, and the necktie about five Pounds = Rp 16,000), it is interesting to note how this astonishing total levy was arrived at: 1. Usual collection fee = Rp 1000; 2. "importing" = Rp 10,925; 3. PPn or VAT = Rp 4.734; 4. Luxury items = Rp 9.468; 5. PPn....1(4)22 (the description is partly obliterated by the post office "chop") = Rp 3,551. Total Rp 29,678.

I need hardly say that I am going to contest this ludicrous charge with the authorities at the South Jakarta Post Office, which is where this swindle took place. The irony of it is that only three weeks previously I had got a package (contents value 40 Pounds = Rp 132,000), for which my wife was required to pay Rp 2,500. This indicates that something must be very wrong somewhere in the system, unless the "computer" was manipulated to the advantage of the postal clerk concerned.

RB SAWREY-COOKSON

Jakarta