Opinion : Mr ‘Scrawly Signature’ signed for my letter!

Regular readers will know of my dislike for modern technology.

Indeed the new fangled ideas dreamt up by the boffins in their laboratories often cause more problems than they solve.

Take the other day when my good self needed to send an important letter. Naturally yours truly ventured into the main Post Office in town and, after a very long wait, my turn came to be served.

After a short deliberation with the assistant behind the counter it seemed a good idea to use a ‘Recorded signed for’ service for my important letter.

A sticker was placed on my letter to indicate its importance and yours truly was handed a paper receipt with a tracking number on it.

By looking at a special website it was possible for me to see exactly where my letter was and if it had been delivered. Actually it was quite impressive that such up to the minute information was available but, being a technology cautious person, it seemed too good to be true.

Such was my fascination with the tracking service that my good self was checking several times a day to see if delivery had taken place.

Eventually the website told me that, yes, my letter had been delivered and there was even a signature of the person who had received it. Sadly it was then that my confidence in the service was lost.

The signature was just a scrawl, it looked like the sort of thing that a child had written yet I knew the recipient to be a capable adult.

I believed the ‘Signed for’ service would yield definite proof that the recipient actually took delivery but alas the illegible scrawl that came back could have been done by anybody.

Upon further investigation into the matter it appears the receiver of the mail signs using a short plastic ‘pen’ on the screen of a hand held computer. Is it any wonder the resulting signatures are so poor?

Alas, the service failed to yield a ‘signature’ or any definitive proof whatsoever that the recipient of the letter was the addressee.

It would have been better if, instead of a signature, the postman used the hand held computer to take a picture of the person taking delivery of the letter and post that on the website instead.

Once again the modern technology has let me down and expectation has turned into disappointment.

What do you think?

*My blogs are published every Tuesday and Friday evening around 8.00pm here on the WycombeToday.com website.

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