The Telegraph has been doing some good work for all those people who find one of those ‘sorry you were out when I tried to delivery your letter/parcel’ but who were actually in!
Is it the case that we are all deaf – which is the line most commonly used to explain why a card was left – or are lots of postmen and women terminally lazy?
Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe the time assessment for parcel or signed for delivery is not right. I have no idea – but it seems to me that the powers that be need to look into this sharpish as the number of incidents is beyond a rogue postie.
I have to say whenever I go to my local sorting offices – which I do generally at Christmas – the people I meet are hard-working and very good natured. So – that doesn’t add up to a workforce that doesn’t bother taking parcels out but would rather stuff a card through the door without ringing.
A recent local case of card through door while local resident was in which I brought to the attention of my local sorting office was met with a postive response about talking to the staff and providing extra training. But the volume of people contacting the Telegraph and the number of people I heard on a phone-in radio show with real examples of confronting the postie having seen the card come through the door is too many for it just to be training.
And I would have thought that basic training would be pretty simple. If you have a parcel, take it to the door and ring. If no one comes – well – surely the postman always rings twice? Hey – now there’s a good idea!
Lynne Featherstone 
I was a postie for two years. There’s no way you’d get away with leaving a packet at your sorting frame while you went away on delivery. Supervisors would spot it, and have a word. Contrary to popular opinion, this is one public sector job where it’s not hard to get the sack (pardon the pun). When you’ve got a sack full of packets, the last thing you want to do is fill forms, and take the packets away with you.
The truth is probably that people don’t always hear their doorbells, or knockers. Much of the time, they’ll be fast asleep. How often have you been ignored while canvassing, when you were sure there was somebody at home? And how much more frequently do you think that would happen if you were starting your canvassing at 7am, when postal deliveries begin?
Volume of complaints? Well however many were complaining, they’re a tiny number compared with the number of successful deliveries. Some, no doubt will be legitimate, but the majority will be people who were asleep, or out in the garden, or in the shower, or with broken doorbells, or…
I suspect restricted time is a culprit here. Whilst your suggestion of “ring, wait a bit, ring again, wait a bit more, then post the card” sounds OK, my understanding is that they are under considerable time pressure. I don’t know if there ever was a golden age of whistling posties happy to stop and chat for 10 minutes with people but we definitely aint living in that world any more.
The irony is of course that the worse the service gets and the more postal workers strike, the more other alternatives such as commercial rivals or even electronic means of transmission become attractive. The Post Office in various ways is slowly but surely precipitating its own demise.
I was really struck in the Telegraph’s piece by the person who discovered a postman out delivering these cards – but without any parcels at all. That seems to go a step beyond the slight corner cutting scenario which, whilst wrong, would be more understandable.