miscellany

[kaberett]

• The local town post office now closes at 1 p.m. on a Saturday. I am quietly horrified. (Took the giant parcel to one of the corner-shops-and-post-offices, which was open later today.)
• We also got a pile of stuff out of the house and to a charity shop in the same trip (plus some food bank donations).
• A made pancakes for breakfast, and then replaced the screen protector on my phone. (I handed him my phone for reasons; he noticed how appallingly unresponsive the touch screen was; I confessed I'd been scared of replacing the screen protector both because I didn't trust myself to get it off without damaging the underlying actual screen and because I was scared the actual screen was also damaged; he took a deep breath and Fixed It.)
• Asking A for the ridiculously indulgent Alex-coloured notebook cover was 100% the correct thing to do -- I keep looking at it and grinning.

Comments

[ghoti]

that is an excellent color(u)r.

[vass]

<3

[sfred]

<3

[lunabee34]

Imagine living somewhere the post office isn't open on Saturday at all and it closes on Wednesday at noon. :D

(Yes, yes, I could drive 30 minutes to a real town and avoid this nonsense LOL)

[kaberett]

I'm used to this and think it's entirely reasonable out in the villages! I am completely used to places where the post office is only open one day a week!!! I just don't think it ought to happen in LONDON. :-p

[lunabee34]

Ahahahhahahaha.

I somehow missed that you are in London. Yes, that seems very unreasonable in London.

I am actually fine with the not being open on weekends part; it's the closing at noon on Wednesday that the post office does here that boggles my mind. Lots of businesses in this tiny town do that, and it's extremely weird and annoying. It tripped me up a lot when we first moved here. LOL

[hilarita]

They're really thinning out post offices; the one near us in a newsagents has gone. And once the PO went, the newsagents vanished too...
I'm finding it interesting that Royal Mail are moving towards home collection, which feels very nineteenth century in some ways.

[lunabee34]

I'm in the US and have always lived rurally, so home collection is always the way I've done it. When I was growing up, going to the post office would have entailed Going to Town, so we never did that. Now I live in a tiny town, so the post office is just a couple miles away, but I'm just as likely to leave mail in the mail box as I am to take it there.

[fyreharper]

Wait, y’all don’t have home collection?

[hilarita]

Not for a very long time, no. But now we do again!
(Caveat: some posties may have unofficially done home collection for older people in rural areas, but this really isn't the model at all. The model was, until the pandemic, either you buy stamps from somewhere (originally just Post Offices, later on supermarkets and newsagents might have sold them), and stick them on yourself for letters (and maybe small parcels if you could be bothered) and stick it in the nearest post box, or you'd take stuff to the Post Office (especially parcels that wouldn't fit through the letterbox), and they'd weigh it etc and put the stamps on (or later print out a label and stick it on).