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The post forwarding service that doesn’t.

Just before Christmas we changed house – moving from a matchbox to shoebox sized appartment. Anyway, as is often the case you need some way to ensure that your post finds its way to your new address. So, what do you do? Easy! You wander down to the local post office, stand in a very long queue of almost irate people and when your turn finally comes and you have selected the right queue, you ask for the requisite forms. This I did, well, both my other half and myself did, seeing as the forwarding service works by person and not by address. I filled in my form and wandered back to the post office, waited some more and paid the 8 Euros for this service. Good, I thought, another little chore sorted out.

Well, the forwarding service does not really live up to its name. Maybe it would be better named the ‘partial post forwarding service’, because that would be a more accurate description of how it works. Some of the letters addressed to me have arrived at my new address, but others, for some reason or other, have not. I did speak to the caretaker bloke at my old address about this and he kindly informed me that of the two postmen involved in the delivery of letters to our old appartment block, one knew about the change, but the other did not. Communication between postmen is obviously not one of their strong points. Different shifts, I imagine. ‘Post-its’ are not, it would seem, widely employed in the post office here, despite their name.

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This situation becomes even more curious when you find out that the Italian post office does not deal directly with this forwarding service, instead, the service is outsourced, or should that be forwarded, to another company, who would seem to be some kind of private postal service. This operation presumably comes into play when the Italian post office finds that thay are snowed under with letters. Rather odd this, seeing as the post office here does seem to have zillions of employees and the post vans zip around carrying three post office workers no less.

It’s all part of the game here, as I have commented on more than one occasion; you never really know how anything will function until you give it a go. At times the service is all you would expect, other times it lives up to the Italian reputation for disfunction. Just to make life yet more interesting, the same service may function fine on one occasion, but then turn out to be a dead loss on another. Hey ho. I blame Niccolo.

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