Postman Pat has lost my Mum’s Birthday Card!

I guessed that since Adam Crozier did to Royal Mail what he almost did to the England football team, standards had slipped; I never imagined however that we would go from cock-up to conspiracy in one easy step. Last Monday, I posted Mum’s birthday card at my local Post Office for delivery on Tuesday, in time so I thought, she could open it first thing on her birthday Wednesday morning; her postman never arrives before 11 o’clock either these days.

I asked the eldest offspring to keep an eye out for the card as it contained £20 in M&S vouchers – I know should have known better – however, if you can’t trust Postman Pat who can you trust? Seemingly standards have deteriorated much further than one thought, as at time of writing on Friday evening card has still not arrived and Mum’s birthday has been ruined.

Eldest offspring and Father celebrate their birthdays over the next two weeks, one thing for sure, I won’t be sending any more cards via Royal Mail: because whether through incompetence or – and I sincerely hope I’m wrong – some more sinister reason, I won’t be trusting Croziers Fusiliers with anything other than correspondence marked OHMS, that can go missing everytime!!

NHS Appointments – Like a Game of Telephone Tag

My hopes that my GP’s surgery had forgotten to call me in for my annual diabetic blood test – loosely translated as my annual bollocking  – were dashed when a letter arrived last Friday informing me that they wanted to see me on August 4th. Now this being my dear old Mum’s birthday, there was about as much chance of me attending that appointment as an MP forgetting to claim their expenses. So in the spirit of co-operation – avoiding the nagging from the females in my life – I attempted on Monday to re-arrange said appointment. However, the appointments section can only be contacted between 10 am and 1 pm which is a fat lot of good when you have errands to run most of Monday. Now for the really fun part!

On Tuesday, at just after 10 o’clock, I dutifully rang the surgery to advise them of said need to change appointment – yes Lil I did heed your “or else” warning about NOT forgetting – only wait for it, I couldn’t get through! So having waited a few minutes I tried again, this time successfully getting through to a human being rather than Robot Rita. I explained to this individual my reasons for wanting to change appointment in what I thought was relatively simple english – I refuse to go completely native in Black Country dialect – you could almost hear the audible sucking-in of breath on the other end; like the NHS appointments system was designed for my convenience!

After much to-ing and fro-ing and much tut-tuting from the NHS side, we finally agreed a revised date of 26th August at 0830 hrs and yes, that is August 26th this year!!