18 october 2009, if it can’t survive, let it die !

Sunday 18th October 2009

Letter yesterday from royal mail redirection services, which turned out to be junk mail from ‘furniture village’, offering me 10% off on a specially-made plastic card. This is 4 months after my move, when presumably most have already bought most of any stuff they’re going to. I’d be a bit miffed if I was fv; and as myself am mildly furious. Like all such, it went straight in the bin, but with thought of the waste of producing such things and the uselessness of my ticking every possible box about not wanting junk. My poor mother, who never knows to tick such boxes, is endlessly assaulted by graphic appeals from charities with odd P O Box numbers sending her free gifts she feels obligated to then respond to. I’ve send back some 20 of these, but its finger in the dam stuff against a remorseless flood. And this is what is supposed to keep royal mail going as emails send letters to oblivion. Yes, postmen will lose their jobs, but the most successful economies are those that enable obsolete workforces to retrain and move on, not those that keep them in expensive aspic. I was myself once asked to cross a postmen’s picket line, whilst temping my way through uni. It was a wildcat strike and we temps turned up one day to find our way blocked. We called the agency who said we’d still get paid whether we crossed or not, so it wasn’t too difficult a choice to make. We were paid for doing nothing all day. Repeat that for royal mail’s whole payroll and you’ve got a bankrupt company kept afloat by a country being dragged down. Its short-term pain for long term gain. If royal mail can’t survive, let it die.