Just been listening on my way in to some half-wit from the UCW blathering on about the postal strikes which are happening today.

But there can be no clearer demonstration of the need for Royal Mail to modernise - a, euphemism, if ever there was one, for 'contract' - than the fact that I only discovered yesterday that there had been a series of strikes over the past few weeeks both where I live and where I work, and it hasn't affected me or the JC in the least. 

The only times I ever send a letter from home now are to those few organisations who still require cheques, and to send formal documents of some kind which can't be emailed. As for receiving post: at home, it's just a few bills from those companies stuck in the twentieth century, which don't email bills, and a few magazines we subscribe to. Most deliveries are from private firms, which are so much more reliable than Parcel Force.

At work, few things annoy me more than when people send letters inviting me to speak somewhere, and don't have an email address to which I can reply. Almost as a matter of principle I say no to such invitations. I had two yesterday, and said no to both.

In the working world today, a letter is about as useful as a piece of cucumber skin. (Of course I make an exception for our older readers, since many of them don't use email.) I have a small pile of letters on my desk, and will get round to dealing with them when I can. As for emails: if I take more than a few hours to respond to an email it's unusual. I'm sure I'm completely typical in that.

That little rant aside, my point is that if the Royal Mail shut down for good today, it would barely register with me. The idiots on strike don't seem to grasp the fact that the more they strike, the more they prove the redundancy of their organisation.