Hi Pat, welcome to your annual appraisal interview. Do come in and have a seat. Now, I’m sure that it will come as no surprise to you that the post office is seriously concerned about your conduct. Come come Pat, don’t look so shocked. Please sit back down. Don’t worry we can clear up that smashed cup of tea in a moment.
Now, let’s have a look at some of your behaviour over the past year shall we. First of all, there’s the matter of your cat Jess. …Yes she is delightful. What’s that you say, Jess is actually a boy? Hmmm, well I apologise for the misunderstanding. But you have to admit that she…I mean..he does sound like a lady cat. And with a name like Jess…well, there was a lot of room for misunderstanding.
But yes, adorable as Jess is; you really cannot be bringing your pet cat into work with you every day. No it’s not essential to your duties for you to have a cat Pat. This is not the nineteen thirties. Rats and mice are not running rampant amongst the mail room parcels, necessitating the role of the ‘post office cat’ to control the local vermin. Or are you claiming that Jess is some manner of disability companion animal?
No?...are you sure Pat. We were wondering whether Jess might be your ‘thinking brain cat’ after looking at some of your recent deliveries.
What do I mean by that? Well, lets take the delivery to Alf last week just as an example. Alf was building a rocket for some sort of race around Greendale and you delivered some of the parts that he would require. No problems there. But then you proceeded to chat with Alf for almost an hour. This would have been bad enough but then; whilst his attention was elsewhere, you entered the rocket, became locked inside and ended up flying it around Greendale for most of the afternoon. Pat, this is not what you are employed by the post office to do. You are a parcel delivery operative. No, it doesn’t matter that you won the race. It was a complete waste of post office time and resources, not to mention the fact that you aren’t insured to pilot such a contraption. What if there had been an accident?
Which brings me to our next concern. What do you think the running costs of an average rural postal service are Pat? Not sure? Well allow me to help you out. They are certainly not in the ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ bracket. A first class stamp still retails for under a pound and one can send a parcel across the country for less than the cost of a packet of fags. How therefore do you possibly imagine we could countenance the use of your own ‘post office helicopter’ to deliver occasional items of mail?
What do you mean ‘special delivery service’. It certainly is special Pat. It breaks every known rule of consumer economics. You cannot use a helicopter costing thousands of pounds an hour to deliver a parcel that we were paid under twenty pounds to deliver. What do you mean ‘HS2 would do it’? Your department of the post office on its own is responsible for 43 percent of the total UK spend Pat. At the last count you were running two ‘bright red’ vans, a motorcycle with sidecar, a helicopter and a further ‘bigger van’ for special delivery jobs. It wouldn’t be so bad but you take three or four times as long as any other known postman to deliver even simple letters. What do you mean Mrs Goggins lost them one time? Mrs Goggins is about 1000 years old man! You are constantly opening other people’s parcels, or loosing them in fields or walking off of your postal route in order to support local school plays or to help out the local ‘one man’ police service!
I’m afraid that you no longer fit with the modern twenty first century postal service and we will have to let you go. What do you mean ‘the people of Greendale won’t stand for this’? Don’t you realise that we are trying to compete with Amazon and Ebay Pat. There is no room in the lean future for a postman who’se idea of a great summer party is to drop five hundred and thirty eight cubic tonnes of sand in the city centre and proclaim that it is a beach party without the beach. Also you are spending far too much post office time helping out with your friend’s railway project.
Enough is enough. Go and join Fireman Sam at the Employment Office and hand in your keys to the chopper on the way out. We are going to sell it to fund a post office staff party celebrating your departure.
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