As a former postman and sorting office manager I find your comments about RM hard to believe.
All RM employees are covered by insurance regardless of weather conditions. The insurance company can’t cherry pick because of adverse weather.
A skilled postman can sort approx 500 letters every 20 mins. Most sorting offices receive tens of thousands letters/items of mail EVERY day. For one man to even attempt to find individual customers mail, as you appear to indicate, is an almost impossible task.
If there were people queueing around the block, they are in for a long and cold wait
Potential snow – and that’s the problem for the planners: it’s actually more likely that once this current unusually cold spell ends, most of the country won’t see snow again until next winter, if then.
I collapsed with laughter yesterday when a flock of ducks tried to land on a frozen pond next to me, and all ended up slipping over and rolling around like a bunch of skittles. Cruel, I know, but none of them appeared hurt - just daft.
I finally got off my arse and dug the car out just now. This involved thawing the keyhole to the padlock on the shed, then thawing the internal lock mechanism, then clearing the snow from the bottom of the shed door, breaking the ice holding it closed, finding the shovel, shovelling all the compressed snow and ice off the drive* and pavement**, then thawing the ice on the car keyhole, then hammering away at the central locking mechanism for a few minutes until the door opened. But I got it down to the petrol*** station and filled it up and all seems to be well.
Bored of this now, but not as bored as I’m going to be when my lodger flies in from Australia this evening. I’m allowing her half an hour of bitching, then she has to STFU.
I’m not ‘appearing to indicate’. I was there; it happened. I can only report what I was told. He invited the person before me to go into the back office to indentify their post as they lived in the countryside; he said he could find mine as I live in the town centre. The one man in the sorting office took my driving license (with my address on it) and disappeared into the bowels of the sorting office, and eventually reappeared with my post. He told me he could only give me letters and ‘to be signed for’ packages; all the other parcels ‘are over there’ (he waved vaguely at another room) and as they haven’t been sorted, he couldn’t possibly find specific parcels.
I, and all the other people there were waiting a very long time. About half a dozen people could fit in the reception area; the rest queued outside. Yes, it was cold.
R…ight, that’s why you put them on and take them off, when you live in a place where there isn’t snow all over the country all through 5 months. If you need to go somewhere, the way is “open only with chains”, and going there at 40km/h isn’t worth the trip, then you don’t go. It certainly beats having to spend three or four days in a sports centre with other “snow refugees” because you don’t have chains for your car and the roads are blocked, as it happened in Christmas of 2008 all over the Central Mesa.
Yeah, I was in Glasgow last year: it snowed twice all winter; one of them was really heavy (the locals were looking scared, which us furriners took as indication that it wasn’t normal) and it had mostly melted two days later. I understand that’s much more common than what we’re having this year.
If the person disappeared into the bowels of the sorting office to eventually appear with your mail then I’s safe to assume that the mail he gave you had been sorted previous to the staff shortages.
Anyway, look on the bright side, all that mail you’ll have to open when things get back to normal
when you don’t have snow plows it must really mess up delivery of mail. Given the better rail system in the UK I would expect it to be delivered city to city and sorted at the facilities. Postal workers should at least be able to sort the mail even if they can’t negotiate their routes.
About the only time I can remember a problem with the mail was a snow storm in the 70’s that created 20 foot drifts which required earth moving equipment to clear. It took days to get the streets open to traffic. If you don’t have snow plows it would make route delivery nearly impossible.
On the flip side, mail can still move city to city via rail. If the carriers can’t negotiate their routes they should then be available to sort the mail even with a reduced work force.
Cardiff isn’t too bad actually ( quite far south & the sea to insulate in winter) but I think they do a lot of shooting at night - or let me rephrase that, in Dr Who Confidential they show a quite a lot of night shoots as they are more complicated to set up and organise. It doesn’t have to be too bad for you to see your breath and if you’re standing around waiting you feel cold quicker, hence the coats.
I didn’t even hear about this until yesterday when a Facebook friend who lives in Portsmouth - Portsmouth- said he was shovelling snow from his driveway.
I lived in the West Country for 10 years, and in Birmingham for 2, and I only ever saw two “proper” snowfalls. Even those weren’t more than a couple of inches.
We had another snowfall last night; light, powdery stuff to mix in the the slush that was just about to melt. The forecast is for warmer weather later this week, so hopefully this’ll be the last of the snow and ice. Fun at first, but it gets a bit tiring eventually.
Woo-hoo! I had a sighting of the lesser spotted postman. We’ve had our first post in over a week. And this is to a house in the town centre (with clear roads) from the sorting office about a mile away.
Yes indeedy, more fucking snow. Whilst the transport network in London was okay today I called into work and said I was going to take it as a day’s leave as I didn’t fancy the hassle (plus it was again reckoned to get worse later in the day, although it doesn’t seem to have done).
I’m so making the case for a home working set up when I get back to work.
I have never in ten years seen snow chains here in Sweden - including way up north past the Arctic Circle. The law goes that you have to swap to winter tyres around Novermberish and leave them on until around March (clearly I am not sure of the exact dates). There are areas of the country that are not guaranteed to have snow (the South around Malmö can be very similar to the UK) yet everyone has to do it.
I’m not fed up of the snow yet - just fed up of the transport around London. We had another 3" overnight which topped the depth in the back garden up to 7". The roads out in Hampshire were jammed with traffic, even though there was only a bit of slush on most of them.
I took my bike and was able to weave through the traffic with few problems (only the odd dab of the foot on the most slushy parts).
Oh and I managed to go skiing at the weekend on Box Hill (part of the North Downs, just to the south of London).
The weather seems to have calmed a little now. Its rained and got rid of most of the snow. It was really starting to get dangerous. To get to my car park I have to go up a small slope which has metal posts either side - its very narrow! The slope is very very icy and the car really struggles to get in even with a fast approach. One tiny slip and the cars gonnae have a wee bit of damage!
Where are you from Baron Greenback? You’re the first Scot I’ve encountered here!
Playing online scrabble players sometimes get annoyed and bandy accusations of cheating (using anagram software) about when their opponents play words (especially 7 letter ones) they don’t know. I was quite surprised to be called out for “gritter” by an American but I get it now
I lived in Malmö for a while, about 10 years ago, and was told I had to switch to winter tyres on 1st December. Winter tyres turned out to be incredibly effective and allowed people to drive almost as normal even in snowy and icy conditions. I would have liked to have winter tyres in Dublin during the past couple of weeks!
Even in Malmö, when the snow arrived, it really arrived, and kept on snowing. It was nothing like typical British winter weather.
