The Postal service is one of the most hated French bureaucracies...

[Reprint from my Ipernity article of September 2015]

... And with good reason!

The guys/gals who deliver the mail used to be very nice and friendly, now they're more and more often curt (if not altogether impolite), in a hurry to be finished, and thus neglecting their duties. For example, when they have a signed-for package to deliver, they'll give you a quick ring, and if you've not appeared on the doorstep within 10 seconds (at the most), they'll have scooted away on their shiny new mopeds (paid by our taxes), leaving a note in your mailbox for you to go pickup your package at the Post Office..

Then, there is the Post Office itself, and the civil servants there... First, the opening hours are simply ridiculous. In my home town, the Post Office will open at 9:00 in the morning (of course, everyone is already gone and at work by that time), then they'll close at 12 sharp (often a couple of minutes ahead) and take a... two-and-a-half-hour (yes!) break for lunch (talk about time for gastronomy...!), to reopen at 14:30 and close at 17:00 (on the dot, too), i.e. waaaay before everyone has had a chance to come back from work.

Which means that, if you need to go to the Post Office, your only option is to wait until Saturday morning, when everyone else is going as well, for the aforementioned reasons!

(And if you're curious to ask, no they will not be open on Saturday afternoon, and to compensate for Saturday morning, they will be closed all of Monday morning too).

Then, if and when you manage to get in, you're as likely as not going to deal with a frustrated and brooding employee behind the counter, who will do what you ask with great reluctance (and certainly no hurry whatsoever), and who will show it openly, to the point of becoming frankly unpleasant, not to say discourteous.

No wonder the Postal service has, over the past ten years or so, lost most of the general public's sympathy! Good service, good spirit, politeness, assistance to others may still happen in the countryside, but for us in the residential suburbs of big towns, those days are definitely over.

Well, then don't deal with them at all if they're so painful and lazy...! Yes, but unfortunately, you don't get to choose... I mean, the moment you're a client of Amazon, or order stuff online, of course you'll deal with the likes of UPS and DHL who are still client-minded and professional, but you will also have to use the Post Office, because Amazon uses the services of Post Office-owned Chronopost parcel delivery service... Chronopost people are more or less OK (some agencies are worse than others, like the one in Corbas, near Lyon, which is awful), but if you're not at home when they come to deliver (and that happens often when both husband and wife have a job), then they'll leave your package at... yes, of course: the Post Office!

They just did it to me again, and it took me two days —count them— to manage to wrangle my package away from their smelly claws! I hate them so much now that it almost (almost) negated the pleasure of unpacking my new Fujinon 16mm f/1.4 lens... Almost, but not quite.

My .02: stay away from the French Post Office as much as humanly possible! And pray they are soon privatized like in Germany! That'll teach ’em.