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.
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