Speed Post or Shoddy Post ?

Imagine the following scenario.

Your family needs to have an important document reach you urgently and decides to send it via Speed Post, which is supposed to be fast. You are expecting it to be delivered at your door the next day (private courier companies do overnight delivery between Kerala and Chennai).

Nothing happens the next day and the day after. The third day, you are seriously worried and
haul yourself to the nearest post office, who direct you to a post office which handles Speed
Post for your locality and which is like 5kms away.

You reach there at noon braving the Chennai heat. The clerk there takes the consignment number and feeds it into his PC. You are like, "Wow, online tracking. Real cool." He then says that the document reached them yesterday and was also handed over to the postman servicing your area and that you should have got it yesterday itself. You clarify that if you got it yesterday, you would not be here.

He goes, "You should get it today then. If not, come back here at 7PM and the postman will be available". You go back home and even till 6:30PM, there is no sign of the postman or the document. You make another trip to the post office. You wait till 8:30 PM for the postman to come, fuming at your people for having used Speed Post.

The postman comes in at 8:30PM. You give him the details and he goes through the mail in his bag. No, your mail is not with him. Another trip to the clerk, who again enters the Consignment Number into the PC. The status remains the same - Undelivered.

They dig up yesterday's paper records and find your document details. Marked in ink alongside
is "Enquiry". You ask what it means. The postman says that he had a doubt about the address
and thus marked it that way. You tell him that your family has been mailing you for decades now and at the same address and there is no way the address could be wrong.

Now, the truth comes out. The postman says, he is seriously overloaded with too many articles
to deliver. So ? So, he sent it back without even attempting delivery.

Can you imagine such a stupid reasoning from someone. He returned back a document without even trying to deliver it because he was overloaded. Yes, this is not fiction. But something that I went through personally over the last weekend. I was both worried about the document not reaching me and at the same time angry about the stupidity being doled out to me. It was really tough for me to keep myself from hitting that stupid ass****.

I complain to the Post Master who says its a mistake and mistakes do happen. I know that mistakes do happen. But this is no mistake, it is stupidity of the highest order and intentional
dereliction of duty. If he was overloaded, he could have delivered it the next day. Or left it at the
post office and I could have collected it from there. But No, he had to send it back.

My people got it back yesterday and have now couriered it back to me via private courier. If only they had taken this sensible step instead of using the shoddy service rendered by the Indian Posts.

Keep away from Speed Post unless you want them to screw up. You pay a premium and end
up with such service. BTW, if my people had even sent it via normal post, I would have got it on
the 3rd day. So much for premium service.