The postwoman was telling me this morning that our little ritual of morning coffee & gossip might come to an end next year because of new regulations for rural post offices—postmen and women in the countryside are ‘less efficient’ than their colleagues in cities, so they will now have a tracking app on their phone monitoring their whereabouts and how long they spend in each house, and will be penalised (more postboxes added to their shift) if they spend more than X minutes per postbox, because if you have time to chat for 5 minutes you have time to deliver more post, which means employing less people and saving money. The postwoman said “The guidelines only talk in terms of postboxes, 800 postboxes per day, delivering post to postboxes—this whole time I thought I was delivering post to people!… A lot of people are waiting for me outside their door when they hear me arrive, am I supposed to throw the letters at them from behind the wheel and not even leave the car to kiss them hello and ask how they are? It’s not like I stay for an hour.”
She will also no longer be allowed to do any favours—there are elderly people living in isolated farms around here, and she (and other postmen) often offer to bring some groceries to them (which they don’t buy during their shift) in winter when the roads are bad, or meds from the pharmacy, and starting next year there will be inspectors doing surprise inspections of postmen’s cars to check for anything that is not post, with penalties if they find groceries or other stuff. I couldn’t think of why so she explained gloomily that the post company started a (paid) service to provide this kind of assistance so it is now wrong to offer the same help for free.
We joked about having secret subversive chats over coffee next year but yeah this is all pretty depressing. She said doing people little favours (like when she offered to ask around in farms to find me some kittens to adopt, and deliver the kittens to me) and exchanging a few words to check on people and their little stories every day is what she loves about her job, and these new rules seem to have been invented specifically to make her hate her job. Capitalism makes for a really joyless, loveless society.
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