Dear Post Office.

A recent TV advertisement to publicise the new Post Office 'Guaranteed Delivery' times.



Dear Post Office: Thankyou for the partial refund on the non-completion, non-delivery of your mail holding service.

As you are aware we paid for two months, but sadly, you held it for only two weeks then rather ironically, very promptly and efficiently returned it all to sender, without contacting us. Keep up the good work. Strangely, we are unlikely to want mail kept for two random weeks and then just to see what happens, release it into the postal void. We could have done it ourselves by doing nothing instead of paying a vast and anonymous organisation to achieve the same curious result.

Amusingly, I was surprised that you have decided not to refund all of our money. It seems rather courageous after the unexpected non-service we received. I imagine it was on the grounds that the mail was kept for two weeks and to me, that's the flaw, right there.

Anyone could have kept the mail then just 'let it go back into the wild'. Keeping the mail could be simply leaving it where the mail professional usually leaves it in say, a rudely fashioned pile or an old banana box, though of course I don't wish to reveal your in-house methods to the general public.

It's really the holding, that's the thing. It's really the holding. Holding would then be following the instructions on the form that we filled in.

I see that your conditions appear to state that you have limited to no responsibility for errors in service. I'd be happy to discuss that exact point with any Australia Post Director over a meal at our cafe. Of course, they would have to pay their bill in full when first ordering and we can't guarantee that their meal will ever arrive.

They may receive just a part of their meal, or the waiter may carelessly crush it, shake it about or may just throw it at their table. It may be sent to another customer, another cafe, left out in the rain, or returned to the kitchen, labelled 'customer not known at this table'.

Sadly any piece of the meal that does arrive, say a piece of tomato, can not be covered by a refund as it would be clear that we did indeed provide a section of ‘the meal’ or ‘service’.

There is still always a chance that it may turn up by 2067, appearing as an evening news item just after the poodle that can howl along to a musical instrument. Remember that at any time we may just outsource the waiter or chef duties to a herd of Barbary apes.

Delightfully, we have spent the best part of several days and quite a few phone calls in attempting to track down the possible original sources of mail in order to get it resent. Those naughty scamps at the bank for example, wanted to charge us $40 to resend our statements, but we get a free biro.

In closing, I feel at the minimum we should have got the whole $76 refunded as we did not get in effect what we paid for, or did we misunderstand your glossy pamphlets? You can keep any $100,000 in compensation and the trip to Barbados, which is reasonable and decent on my part, I think.

Whether you kept the mail for a pointless period 'behind the scenes', doesn't seem to work for us really. Was our mail held for the period we paid for? It doesn't appear so. And that's the thing really, isn't it?

Thanking you sincerly, Colonel Robert Neville.

Ps. Could you kindly recommend another mail monopoly we could use?