Consignia stole my Christmas
Yesterday (the 23rd) we made a point of waiting for the post to arrive before going in to work, but to no avail. When we returned home we found yet another of those cards telling us a parcel was waiting for us at the depot in Sandy Lane West. Since I was taking a day’s holiday on Christmas Eve, I set off to pick up the parcel.
Cycling to the depot would be straightforward enough if it had
occurred to anyone to add a few directional signs along the
route. You start by cycling up Cowley Road past Temple Cowley.
This is a steeper climb than I remembered, and I soon got
very hot. The intersection at Temple Cowley is a little
intimidating—in order to get to the off-road cycle lane
you have to move in to the middle lane (since the left lane is
left-turn-only). The off-road path takes you to the Ring Road
roundabout, and crossing the road on foot takes you to the
cycle+dog path that parallels the Ring Road. This is an ideal
shared cycle path: broad, flat, and only sparsely populated with
pedestrians. The first left would be Tesco’s megamart.
Skipping that you come to a confusing dip-under-the-road
junction with something labelled Barns Road. You need to go up
on to this main road and thereby cross the Ring Road. Another
off-road cycle path now appears, but ignore it; it is leading
you away from a mini-roundabout which you want to use to turn
right on to Sandy Lane West. The home stretch! The trick here
is to not look out for the Royal Mail Consignia
sign, because all you will find at the Reception window there is
a hand-written sign telling you to go back two places to the
Nuffield Industrial Estate. Once you go down there the
Enquiries office is reasonably well signposted. Annoyingly
there is nowhere to park a bicycle. (This is Oxford, after
all!)
Even more annoyingly, there was also a piece of paper in the window saying they were closing the office an hour an a half early today. So the journey was all for nothing.
Could they have prevented this? Yes, by telling me the modified office hours on the card they stuck through my letter box. This card is completely generic, probably printed in the millions at some central printers. Too bad they don’t produce a local version for each Post Town so they can have the address printed on them (we have received these cards with no address on at all in the past). Too bad they don’t have a special Xmas Season version of the card giving their reduced opening times. Given that December must account for a disproportionately large fraction of displaced domestic parcels (as opposed to parcels for business addresses), this would seem a logical measure to me.
On the other hand, is it worth fucking over people like me for the sake of a measly hour and a half extra holiday? Surely that office needs at most two people present (one customer-facing, one fetching parcels), so paying them enormous overtime would not break the bank, right?