davthepunk wrote:
So, what exactly does a revision involve, or not involve (on this point, is the answer - 'making people's jobs easier'?
), other than making my large items take longer to arrive?
In the past a revision was carried out to attempt to equalise walks. Over time houses are built and demolished , mail profiles change and housing and occupancy rates fluctuate, this means that some routes (or duties as we call them) either become too easy or too hard to complete in the planned time. When the balance is out generally they should just rebalance the duties. However, generally over the last decade all they tend to do is take out duties and make the remaining ones larger.
This has led, in my view inevitably, to the duties being too large to be done by 1 person walking round. Also with the advent of e-fulfilment and the death of high street shopping, the mail profile has changed from low parcel volumes to the state we are at today, just in my time its been a four fold increase although that is a guestimate. Also with the alleged decrease in letter volumes offset with larger and longer delivery spans Royal Mail took a long hard look at whether deliveries were being as efficient as possible.
The powers be decided that the old style of delivery (1 postie delivering letters and small parcels by foot or cycle) and vans delivering the larger parcels and tracked items was not efficient. Therefore they are now currently introducing the new DELIVERY METHOD of 2 people in a van and they deliver everything in a geographical area. Now in theory (ie sitting at a desk in an office) this would seem the most sensible thing, and perhaps if they PLANNED it correctly then it could be a good thing.
However, sometimes the planning is just to bolt to duties together and then add on a "drivers" section and expect 2 people to do the new duty in the same time as 2 people and 1 driver used to do before (expect 2 people to complete their daily work in a planned 12 hours when before the same task took 16 -20 hours before). However, they also introduced new equipment which they acknowledge slows people down.
So as you can see when Delivery Methods are introduced into an area, like yours, without very good planning everything grinds to a halt and thing start to back up. Generally in this phase Royal Mail put it down to teething problems and throw as much overtime at it as possible. This though only masks the fundamental problems and when the posties become tired and disillusioned less and less of them work the overtime and the problems mount until they are finally addressed.
So apologies for being a little down on Royal Mail in this post, but even the most successful revisions have undergone the same "teething problems" and it appears from what POSTMAN says your area is in the middle of one of these Delivery Method revisions. Hopefully it beds in quickly but past experience and reports on here don't bode well.
