Do the queues in the Post Office ever get any better?
No matter how much you want to avoid them, there are some things that have to be done over the counter in a post office. So this lunchtime I found myself standing in a queue for 30 minutes, snaking my way slowly to the front just to pay in some money to a bank account.
To be honest, I’d resigned myself to a long wait before I got there, which made it slightly easier to bear, but after a while the standing around, alleviated only by a brief bit of excitement as you shuffle nearer the front, gets too much to bear.
It’s not as if they put on a great deal of entertainment. They have a version of Post Office TV that simply shows a loop of all the ‘great’ products that the PO has on offer – including broadband, pet insurance and car insurance. What happened to stamps, first day covers and postal orders, that’s what I want to know?
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were then ‘promising’ us the enticing prospect of a celebrity turning up in your local post office. Today, that was none other than ventriloquist Keith Harris and his dummy Orville – or should that be the other way round?
Now, Keith Harris and Orville were pretty bloody irritating the first time around and that was just on the TV. If I was standing in a mile-long queue in the post office and those two wandered in, they wouldn’t be very well received, I can tell you.
There would a news story in the paper along the lines of: Ventriloquist stuffed with duck!
