Never in the annals of human duplicity have I seen such a blatant example of disregard for a fellow human being.
It Catalonia it is regarded as perfectly acceptable to denigrate the postal service (Correos) because it is Spanish not Catalan. The same goes for the Spanish Rail Network and the Spanish Government.
If you have been reading these daily screeds you will know that I am no great fan of the postal services as I have spent substantial periods of my life sitting on a low window still waiting for my number to be pinged onto the electronic board to indicate that I will at last be seen to.
Most, no, all of the time that I have spent in post offices in this country has been getting packages which have been undelivered.
No matter that I had been sitting at home waiting patiently like Hope on a monument, knitting or embroidering, tatting or working away at my petit point (bit of atmospheric artistic licence there) waiting for the post person to exert enough intelligence to direct a bleary glance at the appropriate bell and gather together enough energy to push it to let me know that he was below with my package: no sound, no package.
Alas, I must have been so engrossed in my domestic occupations that the raucous sound of the buzzer failed to make any impression on my eager expectation – or there might just be another explanation.
Until today, when a vast amount of mail was delivered, I assume that the post people have been amassing all the correspondence since Christmas because they have been signally loath to give any to the denizens of our block of flats.
Significantly among the welter of letters and information from my banks (Ah! That plural sounds more like desperation these days than any sign of material prosperity) was a little yellow sheet. This was the official indication from the post person that they had tried to deliver a parcel on the 8th of January. This indication (written by the post person on the spot and at the time of the delivery and posted into the box before leaving) was not there on the 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th of January. I checked. It arrived, as did all the rest of the post today, the 12th.
It is rather like the person who put his money into a coffee machine and watched helplessly as amid whirrings and clunks the apparatus went through its normal activities, but did not provide a plastic cup. So, as the twin spouts of coffee and milk gushed onto the metal drain where the cup should have been he remarked, “Look, the bloody machine is even drinking the stuff now as well as making it!”
I assume that the post office in a rare burst of honesty is now not even pretending that the post person goes through the farce of trying to find out if anyone is in to deliver a parcel. They merely send out the ‘we called but where were you’ notifications in the post, so cutting out the delay that writing out a lie would force on the consciences of hard working motor scooter driving post people.
The post office when I got there was heaving with people most of whom, surprisingly, were clutching little yellow forms which indicated that they too, all of them, had missed the post person when he didn’t attempt to hand over the parcel that the post office had no intention of attempting to deliver. Talk about coincidences!
I however, came ready armed and as my number was twenty away from the number being served and as only one person was actually dealing with collections and as there was, inevitably, one ‘difficult’ person who held up the whole process, I settled down with my e-book reader and tried to compose myself in patience and literature.
The wait was worth it because now I have my Photoshop Elements 7
and a 400 page book, ‘Photoshop Elements 7 for Dummies’ to go with it.
With the barely concealed impatience of a non delivering post person I leaped into the ruthless manipulation of my digital photos and managed to eliminate a pot plant from the centre of the table in one photo and replace it by table alone from another.
The fact that I had taken two photos specially to achieve this and that one of them was of the table with a flower and the other was without the flower made the objective of the exercise a little redundant, but I felt that I was getting nearer to my stated objective of creating a photograph of an impressive wave from the stunted variety of moving water features that we get rolling onto the beach in Castelldefels.
The next step is ‘layers’ which I think means plonking various photographs on top of each other and electronically scratching away until you get the bits that you want from the various shots to create a composite. At least I hope that it what it all means because I got a bad case of ‘Instruction Manual Aversion’ when I opened up the ‘friendly’ and ‘chatty’ book which is supposed to take me painlessly though the technical processes to ensure that the full artistry of my inner photographer can be released. I was merely left breathless and terrified at the complexity of the program I had just loaded.
On the other hand there is the painting!
It Catalonia it is regarded as perfectly acceptable to denigrate the postal service (Correos) because it is Spanish not Catalan. The same goes for the Spanish Rail Network and the Spanish Government.
If you have been reading these daily screeds you will know that I am no great fan of the postal services as I have spent substantial periods of my life sitting on a low window still waiting for my number to be pinged onto the electronic board to indicate that I will at last be seen to.
Most, no, all of the time that I have spent in post offices in this country has been getting packages which have been undelivered.
No matter that I had been sitting at home waiting patiently like Hope on a monument, knitting or embroidering, tatting or working away at my petit point (bit of atmospheric artistic licence there) waiting for the post person to exert enough intelligence to direct a bleary glance at the appropriate bell and gather together enough energy to push it to let me know that he was below with my package: no sound, no package.
Alas, I must have been so engrossed in my domestic occupations that the raucous sound of the buzzer failed to make any impression on my eager expectation – or there might just be another explanation.
Until today, when a vast amount of mail was delivered, I assume that the post people have been amassing all the correspondence since Christmas because they have been signally loath to give any to the denizens of our block of flats.
Significantly among the welter of letters and information from my banks (Ah! That plural sounds more like desperation these days than any sign of material prosperity) was a little yellow sheet. This was the official indication from the post person that they had tried to deliver a parcel on the 8th of January. This indication (written by the post person on the spot and at the time of the delivery and posted into the box before leaving) was not there on the 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th of January. I checked. It arrived, as did all the rest of the post today, the 12th.
It is rather like the person who put his money into a coffee machine and watched helplessly as amid whirrings and clunks the apparatus went through its normal activities, but did not provide a plastic cup. So, as the twin spouts of coffee and milk gushed onto the metal drain where the cup should have been he remarked, “Look, the bloody machine is even drinking the stuff now as well as making it!”
I assume that the post office in a rare burst of honesty is now not even pretending that the post person goes through the farce of trying to find out if anyone is in to deliver a parcel. They merely send out the ‘we called but where were you’ notifications in the post, so cutting out the delay that writing out a lie would force on the consciences of hard working motor scooter driving post people.
The post office when I got there was heaving with people most of whom, surprisingly, were clutching little yellow forms which indicated that they too, all of them, had missed the post person when he didn’t attempt to hand over the parcel that the post office had no intention of attempting to deliver. Talk about coincidences!
I however, came ready armed and as my number was twenty away from the number being served and as only one person was actually dealing with collections and as there was, inevitably, one ‘difficult’ person who held up the whole process, I settled down with my e-book reader and tried to compose myself in patience and literature.
The wait was worth it because now I have my Photoshop Elements 7
and a 400 page book, ‘Photoshop Elements 7 for Dummies’ to go with it.With the barely concealed impatience of a non delivering post person I leaped into the ruthless manipulation of my digital photos and managed to eliminate a pot plant from the centre of the table in one photo and replace it by table alone from another.
The fact that I had taken two photos specially to achieve this and that one of them was of the table with a flower and the other was without the flower made the objective of the exercise a little redundant, but I felt that I was getting nearer to my stated objective of creating a photograph of an impressive wave from the stunted variety of moving water features that we get rolling onto the beach in Castelldefels.
The next step is ‘layers’ which I think means plonking various photographs on top of each other and electronically scratching away until you get the bits that you want from the various shots to create a composite. At least I hope that it what it all means because I got a bad case of ‘Instruction Manual Aversion’ when I opened up the ‘friendly’ and ‘chatty’ book which is supposed to take me painlessly though the technical processes to ensure that the full artistry of my inner photographer can be released. I was merely left breathless and terrified at the complexity of the program I had just loaded.
On the other hand there is the painting!
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