Of Geography And The Weather

I WAS ONCE told that people who live by the sea are naturally dreamers or romantics, because they have miles of uninterrupted horizon to contemplate.  It’s not the same for bike riders. 

My cycling possibilities are half of what’s available to anyone who lives inland, where potential routes radiate outwards in a full 360-degree sweep.  Certain points on the compass are non-existent for me. I can’t pedal east.  The North Sea puts paid to that. Nor can I head due south.  The contours of the coast funnel me south-west, at least until the Tay Firth and first available bridge.  As a cyclist, my dreams are cruelly curtailed.

It's April and I’ve cycled nearly 2,000 miles, but I’ve seen little new since the very first mile.  I’ve seen the same trees, bridges, churches and farms time and time again.  I’ve toiled up the same hills and swerved around the same potholes.  It’s every bit as disheartening as the wind and rain.  While my legs burn with the physical effort, my brain stagnates with boredom.  The only relief is when I drive to a new location in search of fresh challenges.  I have avoided organised sportives since last year’s Bealach na Ba debacle when I realised that the only difference between me paying £37 to enter and not paying £37 was that I got an “official” time and a “free” plastic bidon.  The route remained public and accessible to all, whether you had a number pinned to your back or not.  

So I look for my inspiration away from these organised events.  Poring over maps or Googling obscure destinations brings out the pioneer spirit.  But then I discovered something that broke my heart.

One valuable source of information about cycling routes and climbs I had discovered was a little-visited amateur website called Sportive Central. (Despite the name, it covered only routes charted by the author, not organised events).  Co-incidentally, the author was also based in Scotland.   As well as providing detailed profiles of most of the UK’s key climbs – including gradients for every individual kilometre – it also listed a promising-sounding route around Loch Tay, about a 90-minute drive from where I live.

I had decided this route – 80 miles with a couple of challenging climbs – would be a great training ride,  and pencilled it in my diary to complete late April, when the weather should be “better”.  So I logged on again to check some details, and found a page announcing the imminent closure of the site.

After a preamble about it taking up more time than anticipated, and how two colleagues who’d promised to help maintain it had lost interest, the author, “Richyboy”, got to the crux of the issue:

My mindset towards cycling has changed over the last year or so...for a long time cycling's been more of a chore than an enjoyment...I reckon it's been down to the real crappy weather we get here in Scotland...riding continually in the wind and rain can take its toll after a while...

This year I was heading out to the Alps in mid-June...and even having a goal such as that couldn't really enthuse me properly...I still couldn't force myself out to do the proper training...the wind & rain just killed my mindset.

It confirmed my own experience, but rather than feel vindicated I felt desolate.  If someone as obviously keen and serious about cycling as Richyboy – his profile showed he’d logged hundreds of miles all over Europe – had been forced to surrender, what hope for an “amateur” such as myself? 

His words were an antidote to the stirring accounts of heroism and courage I’d been reading in books about such greats as Anquetil, Hinault, Armstrong and Merckx.  Sure, they’d all had their share of appalling weather – Hinault and Merckx in particular had legendary wins in blizzard conditions to their name – but they never quit, and I would take inspiration from that.  But now here was a peer, another recreational cyclist, telling it as it was: cycling in Scotland (which would eventually record it wettest year on record) was relentlessly shit.

Richyboy continued:

I will also never ride another UK sportive in my life...for me it's too much of a lottery to have a fixed day event in the UK...you can easily spend a fortune and end up riding around a 100 mile route in terrible weather conditions...not for me anymore I'm afraid!

 The futility of forward planning.  The certainty of uncertainty.  How many dates penned in my diary had been washed out or blown away by terrible weather?  In Britain – and Scotland in particular – you cannot choose a date, even at the height of “summer”, and have any realistic expectation of decent conditions.  You can arrange to meet on a day in the middle of July and find you are battling through a torrential rainstorm. 

So Richyboy had had enough, and who could blame him?  Even the incentive of a trip to the Alps wasn’t motivation enough for him.  So what chance did I have?  I still had  three months of training ahead of me.  So far, the wind, rain and cold had been incessant, and there was no guarantee things would get any better during the rest of April, May and June.  Scotland didn’t work like that.

I wanted to reach out to Richyboy.  I wanted to meet him for a beer and swap war stories.  Maybe we could find solace, mutual support, in each other’s suffering.  His words were the saddest thing I’d seen since I'd signed up for the Etape.  Everything else I’d read or researched – even the lengths and gradients of the climbs awaiting me in France – had heightened my sense of anticipation.  But those few paragraphs on a little-known website came close to crushing me.

In an attempt to avoid the same fate as Richyboy, I resolved to find a solution to the problem rather than admit defeat to it.  There was nothing I could do about the rain other than make sure I was equipped with good waterproofs, hat and overshoes, but maybe there was a way of dealing with the wind.

In a peloton, a rider can take shelter behind others, but I didn’t have that luxury.  The only shelter I had was when riding alongside hedges, walls or in built-up areas.  So I wondered whether it would be possible to plan a route that made the most of existing barriers to the wind for most of the way.

The prevailing wind in this part of Scotland was largely south-westerly.  It had been registering gusts of over 20 mph on an almost daily basis since early December.  My regular route took me directly into the headwind for the first 22 miles, when I’d usually average a pathetic 13 mph.  The return journey, however, was usually clocked at well over 20 mph.  Though cycling against the wind was undoubtedly good for my fitness in lieu of any demanding gradients, there were occasions I arrived home sapped of all my enthusiasm as well as energy.  Those outward, grinding 22 miles, usually taking between 90 and 105 minutes, were relentlessly grim.  There were days when I couldn’t face it, and either left my bike untouched or resorted to the agony of 30 minutes on the Beast(Concept 2 rowing  machine) instead.  Surely it would be good for me mentally as well as physically if I could find a more sheltered route to use occasionally?

I laid out my Ordnance Survey map.  The featureless expanse of the North Sea taunted me.  My options were limited.  If I was to confine myself to roads and lanes with high hedges, walls, buildings or rows of trees, it would be a twisting, untidy scrawl of a route.  I would turn left at the T-junction and head through the town, where its buildings, shops and blocks of flats formed an effective windbreak.  After that, my aim was to cycle in a westerly direction, i.e. at right angles to the prevailing wind, along only roads which provided some kind of barrier. 

The laws of geography and meteorology meant it would be impossible for me to plot a circular route.  If I could trace a reasonably well sheltered route as far west as possible, then I’d be happy to return using the same roads.  But it became clear very quickly I was attempting the impossible.  All the country lanes heading west climbed gradually upwards to an exposed plateau.  Hedges and raised embankments would offer occasional stretches of shelter, but man-made barriers were limited to remote barns or farmhouses.  There were no sustained terraces of houses or high walls.

It took me an entire afternoon to map out a zig-zagging route which took me inland from the coast.  Using my local knowledge of most of the roads, plus the contours and symbols on the map, it seemed to offer varying degrees of shelter for most of its length.  However, it was barely 16 miles one way, 32 there and back.  For the sake of a bit of shelter, a route including lots of junctions, twists and turns which would frequently break up my regular rhythm, hardly seemed worth the effort.

Instead, I struck upon a far more straightforward solution.  I identified a route that would take me consistently in the direction of the prevailing wind – including a detour up Cairn O Mount if I wanted – and put nearly 60 miles in my legs.  It would be a one-way route, to the town of Stonehaven, from where I could take the train back down the coast.  But even this didn’t seem entirely satisfactory.  If I had the wind behind me the whole way, wasn’t that cheating?

In the end, I emailed Richyboy via his website.  I thought he’d find my machinations amusing.  Secretly, I hoped to learn he’d had second thoughts, and wasn’t going to admit defeat to the Scottish elements after all.

But I never got a reply and his website no longer exists.

Wish I Was There

I caught sight of myself in the full length mirror in the hall as I was leaving and was struck by a crisis of confidence.  The tall, clean-shaven figure dressed in a brown Merino polo neck, black jeans and black leather jacket staring back at me wasn’t going to be taken seriously at this interview.  I looked exactly who I was: a middle-aged dilettante with aspirations above his dole cheque.  I’d be twice as old and better dressed than anyone else, but that wasn’t going to impress a group of line managers weaned on corporate-speak and sales targets with all traces of discretion erased from their brain. I almost turned back to the bedroom.  The hall was dark and empty, apart from my bikes propped up against the wall.  A couple of discarded washers from where I’d replaced my back tyre earlier still littered the floor.  I instinctively checked the tyre, convinced my cack-handed struggle had punctured the innertube.  Fuck it, I was all dressed up, I’d been on my own staring at the same four walls all day – I picked up my car keys and left.

The experience was no less depressing than I’d feared.  There were eight of us being interviewed for jobs in Dundee, Forfar and Perth as well as Arbroath.  The posts were all the same: part time sales advisors for Thomson Travel. My rivals were all females.  A group of Thomson’s managers had been bussed in from the other branches to monitor us as we took part in a “group exercise” before the one-to-one interviews.  The three females in my group were very garrulous without actually saying anything of note.  When I offered a point of clarification, I was met with looks of disdain.  My experiences shepherding adventure tourists around Egypt or US High School students around Europe could not compete with Emma's success selling optional extras as a holiday rep for Club 18-30. All this was noted on their clipboards by the hovering managers.

Then we were each assigned to a different manager for our interviews.  This system struck me as remarkably flawed: even if they were going to ask us the same questions from the same checklist, it would ultimately amount to whether our respective interviewers argued our cases strongly enough when they sat around to compare notes afterwards.  It also struck me as entirely arbitrary that my two rivals for the Arbroath job were to be interviewed by the manager and deputy from the Arbroath branch, while I was to be interviewed by the deputy manager from the Dundee branch.  None of it made any logical sense and yet all of it was obviously straight from the Thomsons corporate HR manual.

The actual interview consisted of Anne reading me a series of questions from the printed sheet of paper in front of her to which I was expected to answer with phrases like “I consider myself a good team player” and “my main goal would be to ensure customer satisfaction.”  I also included a few abstract references to “personal and professional achievements” and “career goals” for good measure.  At the end of it, I had to play the part of Thomsons sales advisor to Anne’s customer.  My previously much-touted virtue of being “a good listener” was put to the test here, but I think I passed with flying colours, successfully selling Anne a two-week holiday to Egypt complete with insurance and the optional extra of a late checkout.

When I left the interview, I was already going through the first stage of a cycle I had become increasingly familiar with.  In this first stage, I was content I at least hadn’t disgraced myself at the interview. (In some instances, I’ve even felt as if I’ve learned something from the experience, though I honestly couldn’t say that in this particular case). Over the next few days, I would go through the rest of the cycle:

• I don’t actually want the job anyway.  It’s menial, target-driven and poorly-paid.  Plus I’ll have to deal with members of the public.
• Actually, if I was offered it, I’d probably take it.  I’d earn more (in this case just about) than on the dole, and it might do my self-esteem some good to get out and interact with other people.
• The more I think about it, I’m a certainty.  Even if I was twice the age of the other candidates(and some of the managers), how could they fail to have been impressed by my worldly-wise charm and abundant life experience?

The final stage is the crushing disappointment and emptiness I feel when the rejection email finally pings into my inbox. 

Lost In The Supermarket

THERE ARE TWO security guards manning the reception counter at my local Job Centre.  They are grim-faced and uniformed.  They serve to extinguish any faint, remaining vestiges of hope in the faces of anyone who walks through the door.   Even police stations and hospitals are more welcoming.  We are all viewed as scum, our past histories in respectable occupations counting for nothing.  Here, we are all treated equally.   No-one gets the benefit of doubt, no-one is innocent ‘til proven guilty.  We are all condemned prisoners, trapped in the margins of a world where caring, feeling people are termed “Human Resources”, and where “customer care” is an abstract notion at the end of a telephone line. 

And yet the Job Centre regards me as a “customer”.  This is patently ridiculous.  It has no products to offer me.  Yet judging by the expressions on the faces of the security guards, you’d think it housed a treasure trove of riches and opportunities.

It is a core requirement of my qualification for benefits that I attend here to “sign on” once every two weeks.  In return for agreeing to seek work, the government pays me a Job Seeker’s Allowance(JSA).  But the people here don’t realise that my skills and horizons extend further than the boarded up high streets and empty harbours of this part of the world.  As ever, I nod patiently as my “advisor” scrolls down on her computer screen through the current vacancies which, apparently, match the criteria I stipulated at the drawing up of my Job Seeker’s Agreement.  Months ago, when I had still believed this would be a short-term hitch, I had said I’d be willing to do anything, including clerical or unskilled manual work.  I soon learned the error of my ways when I found out that not only was I expected to apply for every shop assistant’s or admin assistant’s vacancy that came up, but my “advisor” would be checking with the employer to make sure I had actually done so.   During those first few months I received a regular stream of letters, unsigned and produced by an automated computer without any human input at all, warning me my JSA would be stopped unless I had a good reason for not applying for the vacancy of part-time toilet attendant on minimum wage.  

It was six months before I had a chance to review my Agreement and adjust the criteria slightly.  Now I’m only expected to apply for jobs in the fields of media, education and tourism. But my own eagerness to escape the unpitying gaze of the Job Centre staff regularly lands me in trouble.  As my advisor scrolled through the dregs of the jobs market today, I spotted a vacancy for part-time driver for a company I hadn’t heard of before.  Before I knew it, I was being handed the contact details and job spec for the post of pizza delivery driver, 5 pm to midnight six nights a week inc. weekends.  

I was now obliged to apply for this job, or risk losing my JSA.  I looked at the sheet of paper in my hand. I had to telephone a mobile number to ask for an application form.  For a pizza delivery driver’s job!  I had no intention of wasting my own money on calling a mobile phone number, so headed to one of the phone booths available for the use of Job Seekers.  But it wouldn’t allow me to dial a mobile number.  I approached one of the security goons.  While he consulted with an advisor, I scrolled through the latest vacancies on one of the public computers.  The same sad script as every week.  Door-to-door sales jobs disguised as “Driver” or “Product Designer” posts.  Market research jobs promising minimum wage but which in reality paid only commission.  Glamorous-sounding overseas jobs with big travel companies who would expect you to travel half the length of the country at your own expense to “Open Days” if their search spiders found the appropriate key words in the on-line application form you’d completed.  And at the end of it all would be a minimum-wage job trying to sell optional extras to a load of sun-burned, tight-fisted British holidaymakers on the Costa del Sol.

The security goon nodded in the direction of one of the advisors.  She seemed quite put out at the prospect of someone using a Job Centre resource to try to find a job, but allowed me to dial the number of the pizza place.  Answering machine.  In a voice loud and clear enough to make sure the advisor heard me, I left my name and address.  I’d done my bit now. I could pretend either the application form never arrived or that I filled it in and never heard back, having been deemed insufficiently qualified or experienced for the position of pizza delivery boy.

I left the Job Centre under the usual cloud of despondency.  While I’m looking for employment under my own steam, I retain a semblance of positivity.  But that is snuffed out every time I visit the professionals.  Today was no different.  I’d entered feeling upbeat and confident, and left having been put firmly in my place as a member of the underclass. It’s no coincidence that my local Job Centre – a shiny façade of pastel colours and graphics – is in a run-down part of town surrounded by empty shops and crumbling blocks of flats.  When you leave the Job Centre, you might be leaving the pitiless stares behind you, but you’re not escaping your plight.  The hopelessness and despair is waiting right outside to punch you in the face.

I went to Tesco.  I was cooking tonight and I had a list of stuff to buy.  But they’d moved everything around.  I couldn’t find the baking ingredients.  All I wanted was a packet of sponge fingers and some vanilla extract, but they were nowhere to be found.  Neither was a sales assistant, or “colleague” as they call themselves.  I’d just been to a place full of hollow-eyed souls looking for work, and now I was in a big, shiny shop devoid of staff.  I traipsed up and down a succession of previously familiar aisles and found nothing, no-one.  So, following the example of the in-store Tannoy, I decided to broadcast my appeal for assistance.  Cupping my hands to my mouth, I shouted out: “If anyone knows where the baking ingredients are, please could you shout out the aisle number, as the signs in here are rubbish. Thank you.”

A few bemused stares from other shoppers, then a “colleague” appeared from around a corner.  He looked personally affronted, but led me to the new, unsigned location of the sponge fingers.  I thanked him.  A customer service operation had been successfully completed.  That should have been the end of the matter.  I should have been on my way home with everything I needed to make a Jamie Oliver tiramisu.

But before I’d even put the packet of sponge fingers into my trolley, two more senior-looking “colleagues” arrived at my shoulder, one male, the other female.  The male one, called Greg according to his badge, asked if everything was alright, in a not particularly warm tone.  Yes thanks, I replied, a member of staff had promptly solved my problem.  But this wasn’t sufficient for Greg and his companion.  They commenced a critique into the manner in which I had appealed for help.  Things escalated.  I never swore or lost my temper, but I was deeply irritated by being prevented from completing my shopping by two under-employed Tesco managers.  They didn’t like the tone of my voice.  They said I was being “aggressive”.  The woman claimed I’d called Tesco staff “rubbish”.  I corrected her. I’d said “signs”.  They said they wanted me to leave the premises.  Fine, me too, I said. I’d just take my trolley to the checkout.  But Greg grabbed my trolley and said he wanted me to leave immediately.  He called over security.  A dead-eyed, crop-haired youth – not dissimilar to the security staff at the Job Centre – came over and gripped me by the arm.  I immediately sat down on the floor.  You big baby, said the security guard.  I’m not leaving without my shopping, I said.  Right, said Greg, we’ll call the police. What?  You’ll waste the time of the police when you could just let me pay for my groceries and leave?  Call the police, he instructed his companion.

The police arrived.  Friendly and smiling.  They’d expected to find one of their “regulars”.  Yes, they told me, Tesco were entitled to eject me without my shopping.  They weren’t pressing charges, but they were banning me.  All because I couldn’t find the sponge fingers.

There’s a moral here somewhere.  I wasn’t banned from Tesco because I’m a jobless loser, I was banned because I dared challenge the status quo.  Greg and his colleague, fresh out of corporate training, couldn’t compute what was happening.  There’s a new hierarchy in the business world, where the customer isn’t always right and is expected to conform to certain standards of unquestioning and blind loyalty.  Otherwise they’ll be punished. That’s why the Customer Service desk at Tesco doubles up as the tobacco kiosk.  Customer service isn’t as important as selling cigarettes.  In fact, it’s considered such a low priority, it’s been outsourced to a call centre on the outskirts of Mumbai.  Face to face interaction is an outdated concept that has been replaced by telephone numbers for these battery farms of indifference.

When Greg went home that night, probably to his parents’ house, he will have boasted over tea how he had to call one of the emergency services to deal with a customer who had had the temerity to shout out for help when he couldn’t find where the store had moved the baking ingredients to.

Meanwhile I had to explain how a respectable, law-abiding, middle-aged man had got himself banned from Tesco and that we’d have to do our shopping in Morrisons from now on.

What I Did On My Summer Holiday...

Dear Jessica Alba, Please Retweet my CV...

IT’S THE GREAT social dilemma of the 21-st century – how do you increase the number of people following you on Twitter?
After barely two weeks with a Twitter account, I’ve scraped the dizzying total of 30. I belatedly starting using Twitter as a marketing tool, a cheap way of getting my CV out to people, but I appear to be trapped in some kind of Cyber-Groundhog Day where I’m selling my wares to the same 30 people day after day.
Actually, there are a couple of options open to me.
The expensive one is to pay a celebrity to follow or retweet me. Until tomorrow afternoon(25 Sept), 150 celebrities are auctioning their tweetability to raise money for Haiti. You can bid to have Alicia Keys follow you for 90 days or Gordon Ramsay to retweet one of your messages. Or you can opt for the full package, where a celebrity will follow, retweet and mention you. As of this moment, with two days of bidding remaining, Jessica Alba’s package is the most popular, with the current bidding standing at $4,650.
A similar package with Guns’n’Roses will currently cost you a mere $132.50.
Of the British tweeters on offer, the Stephen Fry package currently stands at $2,247, while Melanie Chisholm aka Sporty Spice – yes, apparently she is capable of producing prose in 140-character bursts – will cost you $525. Her erstwhile bandmate Victoria Beckham’s tweet package is available for $1,525. For the Lidl shoppers, Simon Pegg will RT one of your tweets for a mere $250.
Even cheaper are the retweets offered by pneumatic Sin City actress Rosario Dawson and sylph-like rapper Snoop Dogg - $90 and $92 respectively.
You can bid now at http://www.twitchange.com/.
But if you’re really strapped for cash, there’s the budget tweeter’s option – you can buy packages of followers – from 100 to 5,000 – on eBay(look under “Business, Office & Industrial > Marketing”)
“We will deliver 500+ Real & Active Followers to your Twitter Page for £5.99”, says one of the advertisers. They promise to “deliver them to your Twitter page within three days”.
Other sellers offer similar deals. You can buy 1,000 followers for £10.99 or 5,000 for £50. That’s a penny a follower. The sellers promise: “All the people we introduce to your Twitter account are REAL people and active users of Twitter, from all around the world.”
I was sorely tempted to press the PayPal button straight away. The prospect of being able to tweet my CV to that many people was a no-brainer.
No matter how many times I ask my existing followers to retweet my pithy observations on life, love and joblessness, my total has barely flickered. (Imagine the shame of having to ask to be retweeted.) In fact, I’ve actually lost a follower recently(I have no idea who they were or why they chose to give up on me just when I was really starting to master the art of profundity in less than 140 characters). Then again, it might just be my less than uplifting choice of username: manseekswork.
But I never did order an extra 500 followers, because I discovered there was a high likelihood that my new “followers” would be the products of a Twitter Follower Farm.
It sounds like something out of Philip K Dick novel, yet makes perfect sense in a world where a business is defined by the number of its Facebook fans or YouTube subscribers.
The Twitter Follower Farms are one of the more bizarre manifestations of the sprawling technological cornucopia embracing the world - thousands of on-line labourers tapping away at keyboards in cramped apartments in Communist-era tower blocks on the outskirts of smog-ridden Chinese cities. They harvest millions of false identities and assign them Twitter accounts where they are destined to become – at a price – followers to the vain, lonely and desperate on the other side of the world.
But just like the old adage about money not being able to buy true friendship, nor can it buy you true Twitter followers. These “followers” are empty husks who will never call, write or remember your birthday. And, more importantly, they will never read or retweet your words of wisdom(or CV).
Respected social media commentator Erick Schonfeld says that while evidence for the farms is anecdotal, their existence is confirmed by the fact that the price of packages of followers on eBay has fallen from the equivalent of 15 pence per follower to a penny in the last year.
“So are Twitter followers simply worthless as many people have suspected all along?” he writes at TechCrunch.com.
“Follower counts don’t tell you that. Just as all website visitors are not worth the same, neither are all Twitter followers. But you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.”
As for me, unless any of my existing followers start retweeting my CV any time soon, there’s nothing for it. I’m going to have to bid $95 for Snoop Dogg…..
• In a desperate bid to get more followers without recourse to the dreaded Follower Farms, I have changed my Twitter name. You can follow me using the link on the right.

Postal Workers - A User's Guide

HERE ARE SOME of the most common questions received from members of the public about their local postal service:

The postman never closes my garden gate. Surely he should be sacked or, at the very least, prosecuted and jailed for this?
First of all, you have to remember that you are not actually a customer of the Royal Mail. Our customers are the people and businesses who buy our stamps. Therefore, unlike the customer, you are NEVER right. You have not paid for the postman to deliver your mail every day, come rain, shine, snow, fog or ankle-deep dogshit, so therefore his obligation is exclusively to the person who paid for the stamps on the letters you are receiving, and extends no further that putting said letters through your letterbox. Posties are inherently polite and courteous people and will always try to avoid walking on your lawn or leaving your gate open, but sometimes, after having turned up for work at 5.30 am that day and been confronted by several hundredweight of Ikea catalogues and Sky magazines, they suffer fatigue and stress. If they should leave your gate open, is it really such a heinous offence? Is it beyond the bounds of reason that you, as someone who is at home during working hours and probably overweight or very old, could actually benefit from the exercise of walking the length of your garden path now and then?

My postman regularly leans his bike against my garden wall whilst delivering my mail. I'm concerned his thoughtless action will chip the brickwork. Can I have him deported?

First, consider this. Royal Mail-issue equipment is usually rubbish. The buttons on the shirts and zips on the stormcoats are about as useful as Jade Goody's gynaecologist. The bikes are no exception. The parking stands they are fitted with are useless, and these bikes are not designed to cope with the weight of hundreds of copies of Ceramic Figurines Weekly. So a responsible postie will always seek to lean his bike against a wall or hedge, rather than risk having it topple over onto someone's cat whilst he is delivering letters. Rather than displaying your small-minded and selfish materialism, why not thank your postie for the free and reliable daily service he provides you with?

As a council worker/bus driver/school teacher, I was given several days off work when we had all that snow recently. What I find unacceptable is that my postman was at least half-an-hour late on each of those days. What's the world coming to?

Unlike people in your own profession, postal workers have a great sense of responsibility and collective pride in the service they offer. The world will still revolve whilst a lardy-arsed council worker/bus driver/school teacher spends the day sledging, but it will cease to function the day the mail stops.

What is the correct procedure in the case of my dog biting the postman? Is there a liklihood of adverse reaction in my Doberman?

Even though as a dog-owner you are probably sad, selfish and friendless, and even though British law provides you with complete immunity to prosecution as long as your dog attacks the postman on your own property, it is always appreciated if you could provide the victim with some soothing words of comfort and a tourniquet to stem any arterial spurting. Don't worry, you will not be liable for any injuries caused to the postman, as the Royal Mail is too spineless to prosecute for damages.(Nor will it pay the postie his wages for any days work lost as a result of the attack)
I never receive my mail until as late as 1 pm, yet I know of other people who receive their mail as early as 9.30 am. Doesn’t this prove that my postie is a bone idle bastard who should be severely reprimanded ?
Not at all. Not everyone can get their mail at 9.30 am. A typical postie’s walk lasts three and a half hours and consists of 600 addresses. Someone has to be at the end of the walk. Have you ever considered that you might be your postie’s last address? And be honest – does not receiving your Grattan and Argos mailorder catalogues until lunchtime really affect the quality of your life that much?
Why do postmen/women deliver so much junk through my letterbox? Surely I am entitled to be surly and indifferent to them for having the effrontery to deliver so much useless, printed material to me?
Contrary to popular belief, your postman does not take perverse pleasure from carrying around hundreds of kilos of clothing catalogues or mobile phone brochures. You only receive these because, at some point in your empty and desolate life, you have ticked the box that says “I agree to be sent loads of rubbish through the post. Please pass on my address to anyone else who’d like to send me loads of worthless shit as the more junkmail I receive makes me feel incredibly popular.”
I received a letter from a long-lost friend that was simply addressed: “Sarah Smith, London.” But it took three days to reach me. Surely this shoddy service is justification for the Royal Mail to be privatised and thousands of posties made redundant?
Postmen and women don’t just deliver the mail. When some illiterate halfwit such as your friend posts a letter with an incomplete address or the wrong house number/street/city/country, a good postie will become detective. We will cross-reference as many details from the incomplete address with addresses on neighbouring walks in a bid to get the letter to the correct recipient. We don’t get paid any extra for this service.
Surely if I have a letter that needs posting, and I’ve put a stamp on it, but it’s a bit wet outside, the postman is obliged to take it from me and post it at the nearest post box?
Fuck off you cunt.

*ALL THE ABOVE QUESTIONS ARE BASED ON REAL INCIDENTS THAT HAPPENED TO ME IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS.

Postman To The Living Dead

Residents eagerly anticpate the arrival of the postman.

I’VE BEEN working as a postie in Zombietown*, aka Dogshit City, since last summer. I deliver around 100 kilos of junk mail, gas bills and Amazon parcels to 600 addresses, many of which are up several flights of stairs or at the end of dimly-lit, foul-smelling, piss-stained closes(the Scottish equivalent of entries, alleys or ginnels in England). I deliver to houses, shops, factories, garages, high-rise flats, amusement arcades, pubs, churches and even a football stadium. The recipients of the mail – they are NOT customers, they are receiving a free service from us posties, it’s the people who buy the stamps who are our customers(this is an important distinction, thought admittedly lost on my bosses) – include pensioners, students, businessmen, single-parents and drug fiends. There’s also a high percentage of foreign, usually East European-sounding, names, which makes me wonder how fucking terrible things must be in their own countries for them to end up living at the top of a crumbling, dogshit-spattered stairwell in Zombietown.
The Royal Mail are rubbish employers. When I was attacked by a Doberman in my first week and needed three days off work after receiving stitches in the back of my calf, they refused to pay me my wages. It took a letter to Adam Crozier threatening court action and embarrassing press coverage before they finally – two months later – paid me my lost wages. The Royal Mail also took no interest in supporting me in legal action against the dog owner.(I eventuallly received £100 in compensation from him without any help at all from my employer, whose duty I had been carrying out when the attack happened) Posties have no say in when they take their holidays – their annual leave is pre-assigned to them. And, because we work Saturdays, we are lucky to ever get two consecutive days off, even though we are – allegedly – entitled to one in every six Saturdays.
The people we deliver to are, generally, a bunch of halfwits. They are the living dead. Their brain cells - in this part of the world anyway - have been eroded by too much alcohol or drugs, or crushed beneath the burden of living in such a blighted shithole. Of the thousands of addresses I have delivered to since last summer, I cannot think of any where the occupant has had a genuinely warm word or gesture for me, or shown even the merest hint of respect. (At Christmas, my “tips” came to the grand total of two boxes of Cadbury’s Roses) They view me almost with suspicion bordering on distaste. If these people were my customers, who had paid for the service I was providing, I honestly wouldn’t give a shit. But they are not my customers. They are the lucky recipients of a unique, universal and free mail delivery service and should be fucking grateful for it. But they are not. They blame me for the wads of junk mail they receive, as if I personally filled in those coupons in the back of the Sunday Post for a Damart catalogue; as if I personally called all those freephone numbers asking to receive all the latest product news and special offers.
We posties are fucking brilliant. Nothing stops us delivering the mail, even though we know it’s 98 per cent junkmail and maybe 0.05 per cent handwritten, well-spelled, beautifully-punctuated letters. Our (average) five bags a day are supposed to weigh no more than 16 kilos, but by the time you’ve included your door-to-doors(those leaflets advertising the latest offers at Somerfield or night classes at your local college) and parcels – yes, we deliver parcels up to the size of small items of bedside furniture too – your bag will be bursting at the seams and weighing easily more than 20 kilos. But it all gets delivered. Heredotus, the Greek historian from 2,000 years ago, was a fan: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”
Today, I delivered a letter to a terraced house with a small garden. I pulled the gate shut behind me, but it must have bounced back open – hey, shit happens – because as I was climbing back on my bike I saw the elderly female occupant come bounding after me. She was about 70, stooped and toothless. And came out with the following: “Can’t you close the bloody gate?” Can’t you close the bloody gate? As if I’d just pissed over her rhododendrons and trampled her cat to death. I was too shocked to respond. She was the same age as my mother. Mothers don’t speak to postmen like that. So I ignored her and finished my walk(duty). But half-an-hour later, after the final letter from Sky advertising their HD box had been delivered, I decided I deserved an apology. So I returned to the address, knocked on the door, and the following conversation ensued:
Me: Hi, I'm your postie. I couldn't help but notice you used some abusive language when I delivered your mail earlier and wondered if you'd care to apologise?
Elderly toothless hag: What, you mean, 'could you close the gate.'?
Me: I think you're missing a word. You used the world 'bloody'.
Decrepit geriatric: So what? You should have closed the gate.
Me: I pulled it shut behind me. It must have bounced back open. But there was no excuse for your language. I don't have to put up with abusive language. If you're not prepared to apologise, then you may not be getting your mail in future. Will you apologise?
Musty-smelling old bag: No. See if I care.
Me: You are not prepared to apologise?
Withered, incontinent witch: No
At which point I turned and left. Without closing her gate.
Back at the office, I left a note for my boss saying I shouldn’t have to put up with abusive language from members of the public, and that he should send the foul-mouthed old bat a letter warning her that if she repeated her behaviour, mail deliveries to her address would be suspended. After all, our office is plastered with anti-bullying, diversity and “Dignity in the Workplace” posters.
I look forward to his reponse.
*Name has been changed.