Tag Archives: Post Office

Computers/Technology, Transport, Web/Internet

Off to the Post Office for Us…

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One of the most popular posts on the blog is my post of a couple of years ago about the DVLA online vehicle registration. However whilst I have always been able to register one of our cars using the service, the other has always had an old style form. However last week a new style form turned up.

The online service isn’t available until the fifteenth of the renewal month, so yesterday afternoon I dug out the paperwork and tried to register.

The process makes use of a database of MOT tests and the insurers database in order to validate that your car has a valid MOT and insurance, however that hits a bit of a problem. If like us your insurance and MOT expire at around the same time as the car tax is due the database will report that insurance is not valid. You then get a helpful screen suggesting that you try again once the new policy is in place – in our case that is four days before the end of the month which doesn’t give enough time for the tax disc to be delivered. Effectively we’re stuck with having to renew at the post office since we can’t drive the car without the tax disc, but the online service won’t renew until the insurance company database updates. The Motor Insurance Information Centre themselves admit that this is a problem on their site.

Thinking about it about the only way to avoid the problem would be to get six months road tax this time around to offset the online renewal.

General

Picking Up a Parcel in Reading

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Reading Sorting Office

One of the more annoying hassles we discovered when we moved to our present house was that we had moved into a postcode delivered from the sorting office in Reading, rather than the more convenient offices in Wokingham or Crowthorne.

Although in general it’s not too much of a problem where our post comes from, if the postman is unable to deliver a package for some reason, it does mean that we have to go into the centre of Reading to pick it up. Unlike most of the parcel delivery companies the Royal Mail have their main site right in the centre of the town, adjacent to the railway station – due in part of course to needing to be close to the railway for Post Office Train.

If you look at the picture, the sorting office is the big building in the bottom of the shot, with the parcel collection office being in the top left corner. The car park containing all the red vans is where the Royal Mail park their vans, and the other car park is for the Vastern Road retail park, which includes a few large retail units and a TGI Friday’s Restaurant. Bear in mind that the largely empty situation in the rest of the car park is pretty normal – very rarely is that car park full. The only available parking, and indeed the parking everybody uses is in the retail park car park.

Anyway, today Beth went off into town to pick up a parcel, and drove into the car park. Being a Saturday morning, TGI Friday’s was closed, and the rest of the car park wasn’t busy, so she went to park in one of the spaces by the sorting office. When she got out, there were new signs warning that the car park was not for use of Royal Mail customers, and someone further up was arguing with some clampers, who had clamped their car in the few minutes it had taken for the person to go in and collect their parcel. Apparently since Wednesday they have been sitting in that part of the car park watching for people parking and going to the sorting office and then clamping them – cost being £120 to release the car. Whilst of course it is their car park, and they can limit access to whoever they like, with the amount of space their usually is in that car park it does seem to be a tremendous own goal by the owners of the retail park to annoy large parts of their potential customers by clamping them for collecting a parcel. Needless to say, the topic has kicked off discussion elsewhere, and even made the local paper. Locals are well advised to find somewhere else to park when they need to collect a parcel.

Computers/Technology, General, Web/Internet

Online Postage First Experiences

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Online Postage Trial and Error

Since I had to send a letter to our solicitor as part of the ongoing paperwork for our impending move, I thought I’d give the newly available Post Office Online Postage service a go.

The actual process is relatively straightforward, the website steps you through selecting the postage you need, entering the address, and then paying for the postage. It is a fairly strange (and probably expensive in bank charges for the Royal Mail) concept to pay for a single 32p ‘stamp’ by a credit card, but it is possible to set up a pre-pay account too. However once you’ve paid, the site produces a PDF of your address label ready to be printed. In theory the only complication is if you’ve requested special or recorded delivery, or a certificate of posting, all services that still require your package to be taken to a post office.

Or at least that is the theory. The problem I came across is getting the printer to print out an envelope properly. Granted I haven’t ever tried printing envelopes before, but it was still a pain. Most of the problems actually came back to how I had Adobe Acrobat reader configured. Since the printer is by default set up to print to A4 pages, Adobe helpfully tried to scale the label up to A4 size for me, so when it printed out on the DL sized envelope it didn’t come out quite as it should. The Apple PDF viewer behaves slightly differently, but still doesn’t quite work without some tweaking. In general the key thing to do was to change the main settings to use DL sized media, and ensure you configure the orientation properly. However once you’ve got that sorted, it’s just a question of printing out, and popping it in a post box. Having said that, for this first attempt it would probably have been quicker to hand write the address and stick on a stamp – hopefully next time will be a bit better as I won’t have so much trial and error.

General

Junk Mail Own Goal

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There has been an amusing own goal by the Royal Mail over the past couple of days. You might not be aware, but there are two sorts of junk mail that come through your letterbox. The first is stuff that is directly addressed to you, or more often than not some previous resident. The second sort is stuff that is adressed to merely the occupier, and is delivered by the postman to every address.

Reducing the flow of direct addressed mail is pretty straightforward, and involves signing up with the mailing preference service. Stopping the other sort is somewhat more complicated, and involves sending an e-mail to a particular address at Royal Mail. Needless to say they don’t advertise the address – to borrow a quote it’s written on a piece of paper stored in the basement, where the lights had gone out, in a locked cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Tigerâ€?…

Anyway, the Royal Mail quite often tries to get a regular member of staff to do each round, which especially in rural areas means that many householders build up a good raport with their regular postman. One postman in Wales was often asked how to stop all this junk mail, and it seems got so fed up with keep telling people the same thing, printed up a leaflet with instructions on who to contact. Needless to say his managers were less than pleased when they found out, as delivering this junk is a valuable source of revenue for the company, and they suspended him.

The story made the national news yesterday, and a number of the news programmes publicised the e-mail address. Amusingly after this so many people e-mailed the address wanting the junk to stop that the mail server crashed under the load. Rather than a few people in Wales opting out, hundreds of people across the country now know about the service and are opting out.

This morning, a senior marketing person from Royal Mail was doing the rounds extolling the benefits to the consumer of having the junk, and also doing the usual routine of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt by saying that there might be important communications that wouldn’t get through. It has to be said that this sounds much the same as the similar dire warnings that BT give when you try to get the Anonymous Call Reject service activated on your phone line (a service that will not connect any caller who deliberately masks their phone number so you don’t know who they are). Bear in mind that in both cases, the Royal Mail and BT make considerable sums of money by delivering either the junk mail, or the phone calls, so it pays them to persuade you not to block them.

(Post box picture conversations-with-royal-mail. Originally uploaded by lyrical.)