Post Office Culture Test

by Neil Thomas
July 30th, 2010

If you stand in a Post Office in any town in Britain, you will be in a long queue of people who look as if they have been selected by some strange marketing research company trying to assemble a focus group made up of someone from each strata of society and representative of each type of person in the country with an emphasis on the dispossessed.

It is similar in France but with a ‘bit of a twist’ and I am wondering whether a country’s Post Offices are some kind of strange barometer of its cultural attitudes towards bureaucracy.

I have only direct experience of Britain and France of late, but I wonder whether this would be true elsewhere (for example, I could only surmise at the length, composition and mood of a queue in an Indian Post Office).

The motto of the British and French Post Office services would seem to be: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. (Ironically of course, these are the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty!).

One difference I spotted is that the staff of the typical French Post Office are quite prepared to tell off, quite forcefully and at some length, those who have filled in forms incorrectly or who don’t understand what is going on. The ‘victims’ are usually pretty spirited in arguing back, again at length. This can take quite some time. (I hasten to add that this did not apply to me with my straightforward letter collection requiring the usual ID). In Britain it is all done very quietly and obediently with an almost resigned conspiracy in a kind of bureaucratic complicity.

I could go on about it all, even to ponder whether the cultural diversity of the queues adds to the confusion or makes people more accepting because they have experienced far worse elsewhere.

No matter, the result is that in the Post Offices of both France and Britain, the experience a depressing one – you could say it is Counter Culture, I suppose.