Only in South Africa will you have a president dreaming about smart cities when a service as basic as the post office has broken down, writes Gasant Abarder in a new #SliceofGasant column. But on the few occasions he has visited, he has found caring and diligent postal service workers who go out of their way to deliver.
How do you fit a pair of men’s size 7 motorcycle boots into a box designed to fit a tube of toothpaste? This is not a trick question and the answer is simple: You don’t!
But that is exactly what I received instead of the luxury Spanish-made leather boots I ordered from what I believed to be the South African site of the purveyors of fine footwear.
I had been horribly scammed. The website was an exact replica of the parent one in Spain. I emailed the manufacturer, who advised that I had purchased the boots – admittedly at a price too good to be true – from a fake website. In fact, the Spanish boot makers told me they had reached out to their South African counterparts several times about the fraudulent dotcoza site over the years, but their warnings had never been heeded.
A cursory search on Google tells the story of the same scam. You buy a pair of boots at an unbelievable price, wait for ages, get replies in broken English from a non-specific email address and then you receive a tiny box that a pair of boots couldn’t possibly fit in. Instead of your boots, you’ll receive a pair of the ugliest ski-style eyewear ever made.
When you query it, the email recipient will reply that they have run out of stock of your boots and have sent you this great pair of shades instead. You can keep them or gift them (their words, not mine) to someone close to you. The cheek!
But this isn’t a column about my stupidity. It’s all about how efficient the post office was. It wasn’t the first such successful delivery, in fairness. A good few years ago, I bought a cycling kit from an online store in Hong Kong too and it arrived six months later, intact.
We’ve heard horror stories about the South African Post Office. Parcels never arriving have been the least of its problems. Over the years, the organisation has run into the ground. The service with fellows on bicycles delivering to the far reaches of our country is no more. Costly private services and self-help mailboxes have filled the gap. The state-run entity has seen thousands of retrenchments and the closure of hundreds of branches nationwide. Its bank services are threadbare.
But on this occasion, the postman delivered my toothpaste-sized box efficiently. Even if it wasn’t what I ordered, it had the correct waybill number. When I told the cashier what I ordered, she couldn’t help smiling when she saw the size of the box. Her smile turned into a giggle when I asked whether I was sent the shoelaces for the boots first.
She was now invested. I gave her permission to open the box. The very courteous and polite post office employee nearly fell off her chair when she took out the sunglasses. I told her to try them on and then the post office exploded with laughter that induced tears. She apologised profusely but I was also, by then, doubled up with laughter.
We joked some more before the manager came over to thank me for helping them start their day off in such a light moment. Usually, he said, they get angry complaints from people blaming them at the end of the delivery chain for mishaps or parcels that never arrive at their intended destinations.
Last week, while on leave, I took my mom to an ATM to draw her and my dad’s monthly pensions. My dad’s card worked but my mom’s card didn’t. Both cards had expired midway through last year, but the pension folks advised the expiration date had been extended.
My mom was sent to the nearest post office, where we found fellow pensioner Ma Thandi from Khayelitsha with a walking stick in the queue. She had made her way after several stops to the Claremont Post Office – the same one where my sunglasses had entertained the staff a few weeks ago. Ma Thandi looked tired but resolute, as we were told Claremont was one of only four open on 3 January 2024 in the whole of Cape Town. The rest were busy being shut down or closed due to resource constraints.
The patient lady on the other side of the counter helped my mom and Ma Thandi. It was a pleasant experience thanks to the organised coordinator on the floor, who put people into relevant queues and went to great lengths to help.
The demise of the South African Post Office, along with SAA, Transnet, Eskom and a flurry of other state-run outfits, is yet another indictment of the broken country we have become. Were it not for the excellent folks who still work there, it would be an even bigger nightmare for the gogos and oupas on pension day that no amount of distracting eyewear can hide.
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