Our long journey towards a reliable post office service may nearly be over. A dedicated post office phone line was installed in The Strathdearn yesterday. The story so far …
Back in September, following 2 years of erratic Outreach service, several concerned locals met with Drew Hendry MP and a highly placed post office official to seek a solution. We learned that the problem was largely due to connection issues between the mobile Outreach equipment and the post office’s wireless network. The solution offered was a dedicated phone line to the new hall, installed at the post office’s expense, which would provide a direct connection to the post office network.
For a simple country chap, it was an educational experience following the order for the new line as it ricocheted and looped through layers of post office bureaucracy, plunged into the BT organisational jungle, and eventually reappeared weeks later in the shape of an Openreach engineer who did the job in 30 minutes. Under the circumstances I think we were lucky we only had to supply them with the same information 3 times and suffered only 2 postponements.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it takes a minimum of 18 working days to click a mouse and make it operational, which takes us to 23rd December at the earliest. Effectively this means that the first opportunity to host the Outreach service in The Strathdearn is Thursday 2nd January, which isn’t a great time for upheaval so SCD shall probably suggest that the move is postponed till the 9th. The Outreach service will continue to be hosted in the community shop until then, and hopefully will be operational to deal with our Christmas postal needs.
Re-reading the above, it sounds a bit ungrateful, so I should hastily add that we are genuinely thankful to the post office for supporting Strathdearn when all their services are under severe strain.
