fountain pen ink swatch #7: diamine sepia

Diamine Sepia on Tomoe River paper with a Kaweco Sport EF. Water and paintbrush also used.

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what a great time for the postal service to fail us too!

The Finnish postal service has been outsourcing more and more of the stuff it does to grocery stores. Since Citymarket Länsikeskus took over as our area post office last fall, here are some of the things that have happened.

• The slip that lets you know you have a package that wouldn't fit through the mail slot and you should come pick it up has appeared late. That is, when we receive this card, the date written on it - when it SAYS we received it - is inaccurate. Several times the date has been a couple of days old, which isn't allowed.



• When I went to pick up a package, they've told me they can't find it, oh well, come back tomorrow.



• My package has accidentally gone to the wrong store (twice). They didn't offer to send it back to the correct one if I prefer, which was what happened the 1 time that happened before the outsourcing. The second time this happened was last week, and the package in question was tracked, which I had previously just resigned myself to as the only way to make a package safe for the time being, but apparently doesn't really even work.



• Two packages have taken 20 days to show up from the UK, one has taken 19, and one has taken 17 (the top limit you're supposed to expect is two weeks; the average time from the UK is 3 days, but I frequently get packages from there in 2).



• A package slip arrived on February 17th that had 7 written on the delivery date spot, exactly ten missing days. Because of this we didn't notice it, and it arrived just as I was coming down with the flu and waxjism was going into a week of late shift. When I went to pick it up a week later, the lady said she "didn't know" if they still had it or not because it was the last day before it should have been returned to sender, i.e. it was THIRTEEN days after the date on the card, NOT fourteen. "Don't EVER leave it this late!" she told me, in spite of the fact that they're not allowed to do that. She and a couple of coworkers went digging through the wheeled carts of packages that had already been sorted out to be shipped away a day early and which a male employee was, as I watched, in the process of wheeling out to a truck outside. "Uh... the last saved day... isn't it tomorrow then?" I said, doing the math quickly, and too baffled to even start on the card being mislabeled. "Oh! Yeah, right, they're, uh... being packed up... to be sent... tomorrow," she said. However, when they did find the package in one of the bins, she and the coworker both re-emphasized to me how lucky they were that it was still there.



• A package was returned to the UK sender, who received it FIFTY DAYS after they sent it off, without my ever having gotten a package slip for it, marked as uncollected. The amount of time a package is supposed to wait before being returned to sender is 14 days, and it's pretty hard to believe that it took 36 for the round trip which, again, should take a total average of 4-6, so something was clearly fucky there BESIDES the failure to deliver the slip.



• A DVD showed up 23 days after it was shipped from the UK (with no explanation), which was just long enough that waxjism had reported it missing to the seller a couple of days prior, so now she'll have to figure out what to do with the spare (keep it, return it at our own expense?)

We have looked into making complaints, but we haven't done it yet because the established system only allows for complaints about specific packages, and you have to have the tracking/shipment number. So we can probably be reimbursed for the postage of the package that was returned to sender and the one that took 23 days, but the other stuff there is no formal recourse for. However there's obviously no question of doing nothing with this volume of error, so we may have to call a generic customer service number somewhere? Otherwise there's just their poor Twitter account personnel, and it seems like too many characters to burden them with.