The credibility of our postal services

An old, dilapidated-looking building which hasn’t seen a coat of paint at all for ages, a battered sign-board that looks older than the country’s independence, gum-stained walls, a staid old gentleman sitting behind a four-legged, ink-stained object which would, a quarter century ago, have passed for a table, and a peculiar-looking contraption swinging above his head producing more noise than air.  There certainly is an old-world charm about post-offices and the people who work there.  If you are unhappy about the modernization drive around yourself, and complain that people – and institutions – are playing fast and loose, step into a post-office.  You will no longer complain.

 Most post-offices don’t even have a franking-machine.  If you want to send an article by registered post, you will have to stand in the line twice, if not more.  Once, to have the article weighed and to buy the required stamps.  After affixing the stamps, you will have to stand in the line again to have the article registered.  That again is a primitive process involving the clerk writing a composition about your article on a printed form and then disfiguring the composition – and tearing the receipt – by stamping vigorously on it.  If patience is a virtue, post-offices contribute a lot to it by teaching people how to be patient.  You may be – you are! – impatient on the road, but in a post-office, your behaviour would try the patience of  a Job.

If you think I am being sarcastic, you are wrong.  I have admiration for the people who work in post-offices.  Thanks to them, the system is extremely trustworthy.  You drop a letter in a pillar-box with the confidence that the letter will reach the addressee.  It does!  Come rain, come shine, the postman on his rickety bicycle carries it to the person whose name and address you have scribbled on the envelope.

Recently, I was at a post-office to send some papers by registered parcel.  The parcel was beyond the weighing-machine in the post-office whose (the machine’s, I mean) capacity was limited to one kilo.  The post-master could have directed me to some other post-office, but he didn’t.  “Leave it with us, Madam”, he said.  “We’ll have it registered at some other post-office”.  And he sounded apologetic about the capacity of the weighing-machine.

The value or credibility of a system depends not so much on the machines it is equipped with or the technology it employs as on the quality of the personnel who operate the system.