To be fair, Royal Mail Staff don’t exactly help themselves at times.
I run a small business, and the last time there was a strike, our postie came round the day before it started with all the “sorry we missed you” cards already filled out. No attempt to deliver anything, just a pre-emptive surrender to the concept of effort.
On top of that, instead of the usual morning delivery, he turned up at half two in the afternoon, with a full van and dropped the cards, and disappeared.
Which meant nobody could get to the depot before it shut, and everything was effectively held hostage until the following week.
I’ve got no issue with strike action in principle. People are entitled to make their point. But there’s a difference between making a point and deliberately kneecapping the very businesses that rely on you doing the bare minimum of your job.
So when people turn up at the depot less than delighted and think the service is crap - it really shouldn’t come as a surprise.
And then you’ve got HMRC, who seem determined to keep the entire postal system alive through sheer volume alone. If they ever discovered email, the Royal Mail would probably need a bailout within a day.
As it stands, you can reliably expect six separate letters from the same department to all arrive at once, usually weeks after they were relevant, each one saying essentially the same thing in slightly different ways.
It’s almost impressive. One struggles to deliver post, the other refuses to stop sending it. A perfect system, if the goal is to ensure nothing useful happens at any point.