An Post: Another Nexus of Perpetual Overt Systematic Tedium

<rant>

When we first arrived in Ireland, we struggled to get a bank account. You have to have proof of address from a government department, which took weeks, and the one that I did get did not have a date on it, so it was deemed unacceptable.

In my desperate bid to try and get a bank account open, I tried every bank Ireland possessed, and An Post Money was the only one that saved me - I sent off some knowingly unacceptable evidence to them and they sent me something back saying that this was unacceptable, but if I posted them back the bottom of this form, then that would suffice as proof of address.

Since then, we have actually hardly used that bank account, because we were able to open another one with sufficient proof of address that finally arrived days later. However, they were held in high esteem in my mind...

Until 2 months later, we moved.

When we moved, I tried to change address with An Post Money.

The bank account was less than 3 months old - so you're not allowed to change address.

Waited until the 3 months were up.

Oh you can't change address online. Or over the phone. Or by going into a branch with proof of address. You need to print out a form from our website and post it to us.

One way to keep people posting things I guess?

When we moved, we also set up a mail redirect for one month.

The place we were living in in Lucan before we moved didn't have an Eircode, so I borrowed the one from the office building in front of us, as that building was vacant, assuming that'd be close enough.

Fool is me.

9 months later, we're still receiving that business' mail. A clump of it every week.

This cannot be a cheap system.

We called several times to try and get this stopped. The story seemed so ludicrous to the people in the customer service team that they didn't even really believe us at first.

The most recent lot was thrust into a post box last weekend, rubber banded together and covered in curse words, because emailing, phoning and physically going to nearest An Post Depot haven't worked.

Throughout this time, the An Post Money banking app has taken turns at either working on my phone, or on Jared's phone, but seldom both.

And then we get to the card saga of 2019.

I forgot my PIN in November sometime while doing groceries. My card was locked.

I called to get my card reactivated.

It didn't work.

I called again to get my card reactivated in December. They told me it'll definitely work this time. If not, call back and ask for a replacement card.

It didn't work.

I called back in January to ask for a replacement card. They told me I'd been using my card wrong (I hadn't) but, graciously, told me they had ordered a replacement card anyway.

It's now mid-February and for 3 months I've not had a working card, nor a replacement one, despite 3 attempts to fix this.

And finally, for the death blow to my An Post hopes... the package from New Zealand.

Jared is wanting to get back into American Football Refereeing, so asked Michelle to send his uniform over.

She did so, and NZD$200 later, it was sent on Jan 29.

I got her to send it to my nanny family's house as there's a higher likelihood of someone being home there than at our apartment.

It got to Thursday last week - 2 full weeks later - and still no sign of this package.

We sat down last Thursday night and actually looked at the tracking number online for it only to discover, to our horror, it had been SENT BACK TO NEW ZEALAND.

18 678 kms as the crow flies.

I sincerely hope that this is not the route that they took!

It was on its way back to New Zealand, with no hint or trace of a calling card or a missed delivery attempt. 

Small upside: Jared's first football match was cancelled due to Storm Dennis. 

This box has travelled 37 000 km to Ireland and back, to get to where it started from.

NZ Post was deeply unhelpful - they couldn't tell me who had handled it in Ireland, and basically made out that we were liars that there was no calling card.

I went into the An Post Blackrock depot yesterday to rip them a new one, and they said that if they'd dealt with it, it would have an An Post tracking number.

Since Michelle had the package back by this point, I asked her to send a photo.

I looked up the An Post tracking number on their website and discovered possibly the biggest sign of incompetence that I've found so far:

The item appears to have been transferred from the received international pile to the send international pile in 25 short minutes, meaning a delivery attempt was not even made before it was sent back to New Zealand.

I do not even know where to start with trying to complain about this. NZ Post has completely passed the buck, which I guess is fair - they've done their bit - twice! But certainly they could've been more helpful and understanding.

I'm going to start with calling them. I suspect I'll be told I'm full of shit. My next step is go and camp out at the GPO. Failing that, go to the parcel packaging place in Dublin 12 and start an inquisition upon arrival.

[Post-phone call]

The guy was actually really understanding about it and said that there was likely a computer misread and it read the return to sender address rather than the receiver's address. It's likely to be fixed, but it needs to be instigated by the sender, investigated by NZ Post, and will probably take another 2 weeks.

Luckily toffee pops don't go off that quickly. 

How, with these examples of incompetence that I've accumulated in only 1 year, is An Post staying solvent? How is it possible to have such obvious flaws in the system, and still maintain a functional business?

I feel like I am at the stage where I can generalise.

I've tried to remain optimistic, and assume that we've just had a really unlucky time of it, and that somewhere out there in Ireland there are competent people with competent services and processes that care about getting things right the first time.

I have tried desperately to believe that our experiences to date have been an exception to the rule, and that there is cause for hope, that I should not EXPECT incompetence at every turn, despite my growing body of evidence.

This hope is getting whittled away by instances like this.

Combating incompetence or the inefficiencies of systems here is nearly a full time job. I cannot even begin to count how many hours of my life in Ireland have been dedicated to trying to fix systemic stupidity, incompetence or inefficacy.

I cannot comfortably go into full time employment here, because I know in my bones that there will be someone else who I need to rage at during normal business hours about something at some point in the near future.

Today it is An Post, and to their credit, the guy was really understanding about it.

Tomorrow - who knows?

This is the part of Irish life that I have resisted getting used to - the expectation of incompetence.

The Irish people in my life are a reasonably unflappable jovial sort, and they just roll their eyes and set about pesting people to fix things, or - unfathomable to me - do nothing, and live with the consequences of incompetence.

There is no rage in them.

I've heard it said that anger is the gap between expectation and reality.

Am I so unreasonable to expect things to work?

If you could come to Ireland and carve out a functional business and have it work the majority of the time, you'd clean up I reckon.

I would really like to hold on to this notion that things should work, and it should be an exception that they don't. It is starting to seem like an unrealistically high standard to hold whilst living here.

Even if An Post do everything right from here on out and the situation is completely remedied, the damage is still done in terms of organisational trust, time taken, and hours of my life spent following up on what should just work without needing my intervention.

I remain tentatively optimistic that we will at least not have to pay for their incompetence, and they will resolve the situation, or I may actually go full Hulk on someone.

</rant>


PSA: If you're sending things, addresses are now scanned by computers, and they're not as smart as everyone thinks they are. 

Make sure your 'sender' address is very far away/ on the other side to the 'receiver' address. 

Irish Elections: A Weird Beauty Contest

Started early Jan

The Dail has finished is current term and there's another election on Feb 8, which is an amazingly short campaign time.

Every street lamp is now covered in some ugly mug's face with a party logo, and a suggestion - prayer perhaps - of who to vote for your first and second choice in this admittedly wonderful system of Single Transferable Vote. 

Technically this is from the council elections, but you get the idea

Quick Interlude as to how STV works.

Unfortunately I cannot vote here for the Dáil Éireann (lower house, national parliament) elections, but Jared can, so we can't blithely ignore this strange festival of faces. 

Also from council election, but much the same for general

I am struggling to understand what I'm supposed to do with this assault on my eyes. These are people who mostly have a face made for radio, you know?

How is someone's smarmy smile supposed to tell me about their merits as a candidate or what their party stands for? 

Props to Gillian O'Brien for reusing her posters from a few months back.

I am left to draw my own conclusions about the colour of their skin, the length of their regrowth, their level of fake tan, their age, how they wear their chin, the party they're affiliated with and how knitted their brow is as to how much they care about the conflagration of problems that beset Ireland. 

Surely this approach encourages superficiality and tribalism? All the information I have is your face and your party. Does this not insult the intelligence of your average Irish person? Do they not want more from their leaders? Perhaps they are playing into all the research about people leaping to conclusions about personality, background, trustworthiness and more about others based on a photo?

His face is like big brother: everywhere.

NZ is my benchmark for most things and while it is practically perfect in every way - in my entirely unbiased opinion - I'd say the attempt to include policy positions in electoral advertisements gets closer to what people 'should' be voting on rather than a banal beauty contest. 

Some of Labour's posters from 2017

Aside from fan-girling about Jacinda, I would really like clean rivers, you know?

John Key's face only takes up about 1/3 of this photo - he at least pretends he's got an agenda beyond himself

RIP Metiria Turei's career - brilliant politician curtailed early :,(

Auckland Mayoral candidates at least have a tag line of policy... be it a bit blurry here

Back to Ireland, I mean Leo Varadkar is reasonably easy on the eyes. He comes from the right part of Dublin, even if his heritage and last name makes his Irishness questionable to some. As current country leader, he clearly won the prettiest face competition last time. Will this pretty boy of Fine Gael be able to pony up again? 

This is the 'weird awkward school boy' photo of the current Taoiseach (tee-shock, prime minister) plastered all over Dublin

The most offensive part about this is that they plaster their faces all over town, but the photos look like they've been taken by someone taking 100 photos an hour or an overly officious campaign manager before their morning coffee. 

Not quite mug shots, but close.

If your campaign is based solely on photos, can we at least make an attempt to make them good ones?

Seriously... everywhere

I've lived here for a year and after all my not-insignificant participation in Irish political life, I still couldn't tell you the difference between Fina Fail and Fina Gael. I know there's roughly some historic divide along the lines of the Irish civil war as to who was willing to accept the compromise from the English and the clusterfuck that gave us Northern Ireland, and those who wanted to hold out for a full United Ireland Republic and nothing less. But current policy? No clue... generally, from what I can gather, they're both trying to implement policy inspired by long lost cousins in the other Republic across the pond aka Right Wing guff that furthers inequality.

But I couldn't tell you which one is which and what they stand for now.  (Recently enlightened a bit by David McWilliams) I can tell you that the Republic of Ireland has had one or the other of these parties at the helm since becoming a Republic in 1948.

Ireland has been riding the frenzied waves of capitalism with little in the way of a rudder since the early days of being a Republic. An ambitious new state, freshly free of England's control, but also its purse strings, Ireland struggled to fund their grandiose vision for the first while, and suffered a great many recessions.

[Someone's] (I don't know who's) policies have led to some amazing growth in the Irish economy during the Celtic Tiger in the 90s, and then a crippling bust in 2008, disproportionate to other economies, taking much longer to return to growth than other economies. Currently, Ireland's been riding the global boom since 2015ish, but with little to no economic safety net, who knows what the next bust will look like here.

I can also tell you that despite some people doing REALLY well out of this, there's a lot of people that haven't been, and there is very little in the way of a social safety net either. Social housing is scarce, benefits are inadequate and pensioners get sweet FA from age 66 - not 65 - on.  

I can tell you that healthcare isn't subsidised here, nor are paid sick days legally required to be part of the employment equation, so getting sick is fucking expensive, involves loss of income and costly doctors' visits. I can also tell you it's cold and people drink all the time, and then get sick, and then go to work, so getting sick is common. There's basically a social tax on having a poor immune system and a social life. 

More concerningly, there's a homelessness problem that's rampant throughout Dublin, in particular. Most street corners will have someone begging on them. I walk past them knowing that there's little in the way of help I can give them other than maybe some temporary relief to a deeper systemic problem where minimum wage is €9.80 an hour, or €400 a week, and rent for a studio apartment is €1600 and upwards a month.... Your entire paycheck.

This leads to problems like overcrowding and having 4 people in bunk beds in one room, each paying upwards of €400 a month.

So this is what people are wanting politicians to solve - the housing crisis. The childcare crisis. The environmental crisis. There's a bit going on. But it's OK, because it'll be solved by politicians making promises.

The politicians solve this by creating manifestos of policies to combat these issues.
See manifestos here:

• FF
• FG
• Greens
• Labour
• Social Democrats
• People before profit
• Sinn Fein

These manifestos are created each election cycle and there's a bunch of promises made and surprisingly many are actually fulfilled, according to studies of those that got elected, some even fulfilled from being in Opposition.

So we have shitloads of faces with political party logos, and relatively clear policy documents, but the two aren't overtly connected, and you have to go hunting for them. It's kind of like the new update for your phone, and the manifesto is the Ts&Cs - no one is actually going to read them.

That's OK because there's TV debates which shine the light on the differences in stances between the parties. More vids here. Who watches normal TV these days? And why can't I easily find and stream the whole debate on demand?

One quirk of Ireland is there seems to be a trend of legacy candidates, people get voted in because their father was a TD (Irish member of parliament), and his father before him...  Are they any good?  Maybe, maybe not - but they win on name recognition. Ireland being a small country, who you know and how you are known by others is a large part of any political contest.

Perhaps this is the part of Irish politics I've missed so far - maybe these faces strewn up everywhere speak more to those that have lived here for longer than one journey around the sun. Maybe everyone else does actually know these people already and what they're about? Maybe that's why they do not need to say anything further about their policies and what they stand for.

Either way, Ireland has a pretty decent democracy, ranking 6th equal with Canada in the world, but I feel like there's some ways to improve their election advertising. The current system appeals to name recognition, party politics, and all kinds of visual, racial and beauty biases.

How many posters can you get in one shot? 16 and counting...

The logistics of putting up these posters is quite daunting and usually involves ladders next to busy roads. One of the PBP volunteers suffered a serious head injury last year while putting posters up on a lamppost.

If you really want an Irish Republic, vote for Sinn Fein.
I thought there already was an Irish Republic, but I think they're meaning a United Ireland

From an environmental perspective, the amount of plastic that each candidate uses is unbelievable, and none of it can be recycled, so it all ends up in landfills. We're speaking about over 600, 000 posters per election cycle.

It is not only me - this is such a problem there's a website willing to promote those willing to forego posters. One specific company has offered to recycle election campaign posters and some candidates and parties go out of their way to reuse posters rather than recycle them. Green News says a total rethink is needed.

There's not really an easy visual alternative that will withstand the Irish weather.
Do you make them with wood instead? How many trees would that use?

Could you use cardboard? Probably wouldn't survive the elements.

Do you glue on posters like concert posters?

Perhaps one could go the way of Northern Ireland and have murals on the end of each block of houses that get painted over each time there's an election?

All this is made trickier with laws such as posters can only be up for 30 days before and 7 days after an election - it can't be anything too permanent. 

In a digital age, I'd expect that online advertising would be forthcoming, but I've not seen any. Given the pandemonium of the British and US elections and the schtick Facebook has been getting, I can understand why people might steer clear of that. 

I did get this gem on Facebook the other night though.

I do not even know which electorate he's running for, and still nothing on his policies.

Surely there must be a better way?!

There's the aesthetic argument as eloquently laid out by a Tidy Towns spokesperson here. They look terrible.

There's the environmental aspect - recycling should be the last option not the first, and 600 000 posters is not a small amount, not to mention the non-recyclable cable ties.

In researching this post, I stumbled upon a really great website called Poster Free who are advocating for environmental reasons that plastic posters should be banned as they're not in line with the EU's direction towards a circular economy by 2030.

The next day we received a flyer from someone who was campaigning on a no-poster platform. I think if I could vote, he'd be my guy at this stage.

Pls also send gifts, money, yourself or treats to this address ;)

This is what 'be the change you want to see' looks like. Snaps for you, good sir.

The Snap Cup!

My favourite alternative so far is face masks! In May last year, a local council candidate in Portlaoise chose cardboard face masks instead of using Corriboard posters when he was canvassing.

So brilliant! His strategy seems to have worked as he's now on the Portlaoise City Council!

Green News cites several candidates in Cork who ran without posters, and incumbents who were re-elected without using posters at all. Going around and actually talking to people won out in the end, helping Cork's Kieran McCarthy regain his council seat. This is great! Refuse is the first and most important 'R'

People Before Profit studiously go around and collect their posters for reuse and I've heard of several others doing this as well. This is a great example of reusing.

Panda has promised to recycle candidates posters for free and that's a nice PR stint for them, but recycling should be the last resort, not the first.

Aside from the posters, there's a proliferation of flyers as well, I believe we're up to 10 or so different candidates in our area - multiply that by the 2, 003, 645 dwellings in Ireland and that's over 20 million flyers that have been distributed for 1 election cycle! Paper is at least more sustainable than plastic, but it's still a significant footprint and I doubt any of them were made with recycled paper.

In sum, the use of election posters here gets a lot of names, faces and parties out in your face, but does little to disseminate useful information to the electorate, wastes precious resources, insults the public's intelligence, and creates a pissing contest over who can have - and who can afford - the most posters.

Ireland, you need to have a long hard look at yourself and think about the kind of democracy you want for yourselves.

I think for a nation so obsessed with green, there must be a greener way elections can be done.

Places like Belgium, France and from memory, the Wellington City Council have a brochure that has standardised information for all the candidates for each constituency where they provide all the relevant information and you can make an informed decision based on information and policy with all of the facts in front of you. It gets mailed out with your voting papers. I would suggest this would be a model to strive towards, or perhaps an online version to have even less of an environmental footprint.

After a week of researching and reading about this topic I have *just* found a website called 'whichcandidate.ie', which basically does exactly that.

The conversation is happening and public opinion is opposed to plastic posters. Here's hoping more people will learn about this useful online tool, it becomes more user friendly, and the chaotic cluster of questionable countenances kindly curtails.

Follow up reading: https://greennews.ie/election-poster-reuse-or-rethink/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland