Friday, April 07, 2006

An insult to our intelligence.

keefieboy has a good piece on this but I was steaming more than my coffee was when I read it in Emirates Today this morning so I had to get it off my chest too.

Front page story in Emirates Today is Crackdown on private usage of company PO boxes and begins Emirates Post is launching a blitz on abuse of the postal service in a bid to stop important business documents from getting lost or delayed.

An Emirates Post spokesman said: (and remember this is not April 1st) The personal mail of hundreds of employees causes a lot of confusion, while sorting out the company mail takes time. Sometimes the official mail gets lost or delayed. A letter to businesses is along the same lines: We want to prevent the loss of company's mail due to sorting confusion when personal letters are addressed to the company's PO Box"

I hardly know where to start! First of all, "abuse". Why and how the hell is it abuse to send stuff to people through the mail?

Look EP, a PO Box number is a PO Box number. You sort the mail and put it in the box that carries the same number as written on the envelope. OK? Got it? It isn't rocket science.

Whether it's private or company mail is totally irrelevant to the process and it has nothing to do with "important business documents getting lost or delayed." That's down to good old incompetence.

The story goes on to say that as part of an overall plan EP will Inform companies of employees they suspect of using business postal facilities for private material." Hey, EP - they already know!

How on earth will that ease the load on the overworked sorting staff who are being confused already? In addition to their current workload they will have to somehow separate peoples' business and private mail.

And I have a question on that. How are you going to work out which items contain private material and which contain company material? Difficult when items are addressed to the same person at the same PO Box number. Are you going to open them all? How else will you know?

You know, I suspect that there are some who might see this as an attempt to deflect criticism about lost and late mail onto the users of the postal system. And as a money-grabbing exercise, considering that a private PO Box costs Dh300 a year, plus extra for extra keys.

But surely that can't be what's behind it.

4 comments:

nzm said...

It would be nice if Emirates Post would deliver my personal mail to our shiny, new, hardly-used (except for wonderful Emaar propaganda)postbox in the basement of our building.

Then I wouldn't have to clog up their overloaded system of delivering personal mail to our business address, because the size of our postbox in the DIC is barely big enough for a couple of letters as it is.

Our apartment building even has a mail-sorting room! Of course, it's never used because EP doesn't do home deliveries.

Maybe they should sort out their delivery system to accommodate their customers. But then, it's always simpler to take the easier more money-making option.

Seabee said...

Welcome back!

Cracking Boy said...

Emirates Post perhaps is running low on budget and now they want to generate revenue by this! I'm not gonna pay freaking 300DHS per year for a metal box that I need to drive down in traffic for reaching it and pickup the mail(Dhaaaaaa! Mails have to come to you not you go to your mails!!)

Their goal should be providing convenient postal service for the people living in UAE. They have to increase their capacity/systems/facilities if they think they cannot handle the volume of the mails. They are not supposed to make it easier for themselves with urging people to get personal PO boxes. I think this is very absurd.

adevents said...

The same old story some people in Ad banned watchmen from cleaning the cars of residents just to make people use the big company services and EP looks like they want to do the same