Thursday, November 20, 2008

Missing publications and the disabled

In any given year, I end up missing a number of my monthly magazines that I subscribe to. Why is this the case? One wonders what happens to them....

I can only think of the following reasons:

1. They never arrive. This is highly unlikely since they do, for the rest of the year.

2. The sorters at the post office have vision problems and therefore don't put them in the right box.

3. The sorters are either under the influence and/or are semi- or illiterate and are not doing their job of putting the mail in their right boxes.

4. When these are put in the wrong boxes, the 'recipients' either throw away what they wrongly receive or if it's an interesting magazine, etc., take possession of it and never return it.

Now, considering that we pay through our noses for publications and the postal services, it's very infuriating for our mail to go missing on a consistent basis, despite making numerous complaints about it to the various employees of POSTA. Other than saying 'sorry', there's not much they can do about missing and lost mail.

Second point - Since some years, I've been trying to get our post office to become disabled 'friendly', to no avail. So many of their offices are up staircases with no lift (elevator), working and the parcel office is an insult to the disabled. Do our postal authorities think that disabled people don't get any mail or parcels? I was assured many years ago and even recently that there are plans to move the registered post window/s downstairs as well as a ramp with a grab bar built at the parcels office, but, none of these have as yet materialized. Why?

They also seem to think, like many other places, that the disabled don't drive and/or are driven and don't provide any parking places for them. Again, why?

Their employees are also highly insensitive to the various disabilities that a person can suffer from. One example in recent memory was last week when I went to pay my box rental fee. Now, I have a hearing problem among many other things since I suffer from Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The lady who was attending to the counter continued mumbling despite me telling her that I couldn't make out what she was saying and that I needed to see her lips moving and could she also speak louder. Her response to both my walking stick and my request was an annoyed look and a reluctantly raised voice. Is this the way they deal with the public?

And one gets the feeling that their continuously rising postal rates are inversely proportional to their 'services'!

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