Customer is always... wrong!

This customer-friendly slogan coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge often is miles away from the harsh reality. Today I've had one more chance to prove it.

This morning my younger sister had to send some documents by the regular mail. Like the majority of young people nowadays (including myself) she does not actually visit the post-office every day which appears to be a pretty logical thing to do with e-mails, faxes, scanners and other great achievements of humanity.

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Knowing the particularities of the Russian postal system, it's even more understandable why people would use its services as seldom as possible. Letters delivered a month later than expected or not delivered at all, packages lost somewhere on the way between the cities, postal workers whose behaviour with customers I would euphemistically prefer to call not so amiable... All this scares potential clients away from the Russian postal service in a much more efficient way than any Royal Mail strikes would ever do.

So my sibling was unlucky enough not to have any alternative to visiting the grim and unfriendly post-office. While she was filling in the blanc she realised that there were new requirements. Being a not so frequent post-office visitor she politely asked a postal worker to help her. Since it was not a New Year postcard but important papers it was crucial that she do everything very accurately.

There were several postal workers: one of them just shrugged away her request and all the others explained the requirements in a different way. Finally the senior worker who she addressed as the last resort displayed open hostility to her. She said that people who have no idea how the postal system works shouldn't be using its services, and that her colleagues had already wasted their time explaining to her the simplest things several times.

To make this long story shorter, my sister had to rely solely on her idea of how the things should be done in this ever changing bureaucratic system, and filled in the form according to her understanding. Now the best thing to do would be to hope for the best! Logically, she did everything in a proper way but in some matters logic is just not applicable...