All I can say after this is that I seriously do not envy postmen. And the reason has mostly to do with the stupid fucking letterboxes that most people attach to their stupid fucking front doors.
The majority are quite agreeable, just a little piece of metal on a hinge that you pop open and drop whatever you need through. I have no problem with these. But then you get the letterbox that seems to have been weighted, so you nearly break your wrist trying to get the thing open with your one available hand. Then there's the letterbox so small you could barely fit a postage stamp through, requiring much faffing about folding the leaflet up so you can deposit the thing. There's the sideways letterbox, which is just unnecessary. You can also get the letterbox that is blocked by a big piece of netting that the stupid owners have draped behind the door, meaning it goes in only half way and needs to be pushed further, often getting stuck. (Home owners with this set-up are disproportionately dog-owners, making the process of pushing your hand through the letter box needlessly stressful). There's the letterbox that is located at the foot of the door, as if gravity can't be trusted to bring the post down onto the doormat and so must be placed there. This requires bending down, which doesn't bear thinking about.
But all these, dear reader, are tolerable, at least when compared with the dreaded 'brush seal draught excluder'. (Click here to see a twat installing one of these evil little bastards specifically to ruin my day). The brush seal draught excluder is a horrible little device designed, oddly enough, to exclude draughts. This is a letterbox with heavy brushes on the inside through which the mail needs to be pushed. They might as well attach barbed wire. A leaflet cannot be simply dropped through this thing, and needs to be pushed all the way through. But when you remove your hand the tops of your fingers scrape along the inside of the letterbox, which really, really hurts. Thus to push a leaflet though one of these things you need, in theory, to wrap it around your hand and slide the thing in. It never works like that. I had lost the top layer of the back of my hand by the end of the day, and all so these people could save a fraction of a penny every year in retained heat.
Why do we find it acceptable as a society to put our valiant postmen, takeaway owners and
entrepreneurial nursery-owner's sons through all this? I'm honestly appalled that postmen have never taken industrial action over this issue. So I am now proposing a simple solution to this menace: nothing less than the full standardisation of all letterboxes in the country.
This will have numerous benefits. First, the postman will have a much easier job, and will immediately feel his quality of life increase a hundredfold. (At least until building is finished, in the mean time delivering letters might be tricky). Secondly, this will give much needed labour to our numerous unemployed. There's actually good economic sense behind this plan, as these are jobs which, by their nature, cannot be outsourced abroad. Doors in London can only be changed in London by inhabitants of London, not from a call centre in New Delhi (though they're probably working on that). Thus there will be few withdrawals from the economy, and the tax-payer will get greater value for money. And as the worse off will be getting into this work, the multiplier effect will be much greater, as the poorer you are the greater your marginal propensity to consume i.e. they're more likely to spend the money they're paid, which in turn creates more jobs.
But what about the draughts?!
What about them? The amount of heat you lose from having the regular kind of letterbox is probably proportional to the amount of blood you lose from a pin-prick. If the same workers who fix your door also insulate your attic, that will more than offset the heat you'll lose from the letterbox. Ultimately this standardisation of letterboxes should be only one form of nationwide house renovation to provide jobs and help us towards a green economy.
But the Englishman's house is his castle, and what's left of our national identity may be deeply offended by the state meddling in the British home. 'My house is my house, the government has no right to tell me what letterbox to have'. Really? You didn't even care about the thing till now. You'll still get your letters, the postman will have an easier time of it and maybe somebody will get back into work. Stop complaining you petty, middle-England, NIMBYist, Daily Mail reading prick.
There is a nation out there of quietly suffering posties and eighteen year old boys with sore knuckles. It is our job to ease their pain.
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