The UK postal service is getting worse. The impact of losing some letters in the post has impacted upon my life in trivial and not so trivial ways.
For example, my wife ordered some Tesco vouchers for some cinema tickets so we could watch Toy Story 3. 10 days later they have not turned up. Lost in the post apparently. Now we have to figure out how to sort this out. Lost to us: quite a lot of money in vouchers and the time and effort to try and sort it out. It's not exactly life threatening, but it's annoying.
But my biggest annoyance was when my hospital sent me an appointment by post and this did not turn up. I had been waiting 6 months for this appointment. So I had to write to my doctor for a re-schedule, grovel to get an an appointment because apparently was a bad customer for not attending an expensive consultation, and lo and behold I have to wait to November. Not only is the postal service doing my health a dis-favour, but so is my local heath provider. Surely the NHS never gets any mail lost en-route, since they don't seem to believe me when I tell them when my mail does not arrive.
So I'm stuck with the current postal service that does not seem to care about lost mail and because we have a monopoly running this service on the last mile, my mail will be subject to poor service and there is nothing I can do about it. I feel powerless, annoyed and I seem to have no way to get this resolved.
