Last word
PO blues
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Post Office is run by maniacs and half-wits. That may seem an exaggerated, hyperbolic statement, a cheap attempt to grab attention. So before I go further I had better demonstrate its truth. The London Telephone Directory comPrises four volumes. Its 2950 pages contain some 1,200,000 entries. (These figures are 111Y own rough calculations but are, I dare say, as accurate as anything that the Post Office is likely to provide). The Directory lists each subscriber's name, address and telephone number, the address sometimes in abbreviated form (the Post Office regularly complains that the size of the Directory is becoming unmanageable — Ha!) Each number consists, of course, of seven digits; one of Mr Kingsley Amis's characters speaks wistfully of the pre-Benn days when someone's exchange — HAM, KNI — actually told you where they lived, but that is by the way. But in addition to the three , figure exchange code plus four-figure number, every single number listed in the London Directory is preceded by the STD Prefex '01'. After much thought someone at the Post Office realised that most of those using the Directory would be dialling from within London, and added here and there the advice not to use the prefix. Some people — P"Seal, Einstein, you, me — might have suggested leaving out the prefix and adding, occasionally, a reminder to precede the number with '01' when ringing from outside London. In the latest volumes of the Directory the old rubric is dropped and it is, Pre' sulnably, assumed that users will know not to dial '01' first. The prefix itself still appears before every number, as otiose and absurd as ever. In printers' parlance the extent, and thus ,the cost, of printed matter is measured in ens', an en being the average size of a Character . So it is that the London Telephone Directory contains something like 3.6 million entirely superfluous ens, the equivalent of 600,000 words or the length of Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels and nrighton Rock together. QED, I trust. So much for the PO's Telecommunications Division, as it likes polysyllabically to call itself. At Postal Headquarters, St Martins le Grand, London EC1A 'HQ, they are trying to keep their end up. All advanced countries have introduced some form of postal code — what the Americans call a zip code — in recent years. Almost all have decided on a simple numerical code, usually five digits. This has a variety of advantages: it is easy to operate, convenient to memorise. For example, I can remember the zip codes of some addresses in New York, 10016 as it might be. The French, with Gallic deftness, grafted the code onto the old two-figure number for the departement, so that the code for an address in the Benches du Rhone will be a five-digit number beginning 13. That was too simple for our Post Office, where a team of handpicked anal madmen (I assume) devised a Postcode system of stupefying complication. The PO's own code, quoted above, is a fair example (try typing such a code: six movements of the shift key are required). What is the purpose of these grotesquely cumbersome codes? The American or French code does not pretend to be a detailed summary of an address. It.merely helps route a letter to the local post office whence it will be delivered. Are our Postcodes a substitute for an address? Well, actually, no. According to Mr K.S. Noble, the PO's Director of Postal Mechanisation, the Postcode is merely a 'summary of the address which can be easily converted into machine readable language' (sic). He adds, 'We still require the full postal address to enable the postmen to deliver the letter at the end of its journey'. In other words the Postcode system is a hopelessly unsatisfactory compromise. Just how unsatisfactory may be judged by the speed with which practical use of Postcodes has been made. The codes were introduced in 1966. Nine years later, in 1975, 'about 6 per cent' of mail was being sorted automatically. The PO now admits that the full operation of Postcodes and of automatic sorting will be 'spread over a number of years into the 1980s'. A twentyyear introduction period for a major technical development would be thought a trifle leisurely in any ordinary commercial organisation, but then the Post Office is not an ordinary organisation; nor is it run on commercial principles. It made a profit of £36m. in 1977-8, but given its monopoly of the posts, and more important of telephones, it is much more remarkable that it sometimes manages to make a loss, as in 1975-6 when 00m. was lost.
The vexation of the Postcodes might be tolerable if we knew that their use would eventually produce a faster and quicker postal service, but anyone who believes that, after the experience of recent years, will believe anything. The decline of our postal service is peculiarly irritating. Our telephones have never been much good: who, on first visiting the United States, has not been startled by the speed with which calls are connected or with which the operator answers, by the infrequency of wrong numbers and of crossed lines? But the British postal service was once a marvel of efficiency and speed. Mr Philip HopeWallace, when he first wrote opera criticism, would post his notice in Pimlico in the morning knowing that it would reach The Times that afternoon in time to be set for the following day's paper. That was forty years ago, but even we teeny-boppers can remember when a letter with a — what was it? — 3d stamp would almost certainly reach its destination the next day. For some time now papers have had to use other means — the railway Red Star service from the country, taxis within London — to be sure that copy reaches them within twenty-four hours.
Complaint is useless. The rational course is to stop writing letters, to stop whimpering and to sit back and watch the Post Office disintegrate. For those with simple visual tastes there is one consolation: our Post Office is showing increased flair for that sure sign of banana-republicanism, the garishly pretty picture stamp.
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