After another mind-numbing Australia Post experience, I noticed that the receipts were saying, in friendly capital letters:

PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON TODAY’S VISIT AT AUSPOST.COM.AU/MYVISIT


So I did.

There was also a free-text entry for me to explain why, on a scale from 0 to 10, I marked my likelihood to recommend AustPost to friend, family or colleague to be 0. I’m not even sure I’d recommend it to somebody I disliked.

I had two interviews for a TFN and passport applications. I mentioned this to the attendant, who told me to queue nonetheless, despite it being the time of the interview; I’m not sure what the point was of making an appointment. When my turn came, the person asked what I wanted, then said that she couldn’t do the TFN bit, and that I’d have to wait; for what, I don’t know.¹ About 5 minutes later, she decided she could, in fact, process the TFN. All through the process, the person was slow, unhelpful and bordering on rude, at some point questioning why I would even have to do this. She asked questions repeatedly without apparently paying attention to the answers, ignored my offer of documents, even though it turned out those were the ones she was looking for. I now have applied for the TFN, but there was something wrong with the passport application form that I printed, and she suggested that I use one of their form. It took two requests from me, after she made that suggestion, for her to actually give me the form.²

This is one more bad experience in a lengthening chain which makes me dread having anything to do with AusPost a bit more each time. I thought only my previous local outlet was staffed by people of dubious skills and/or work ethics, but I am starting to fear this is more widespread.

PS: Neither the outlet ID nor the receipt number were present where indicated on the dockets I received. A bit of guesswork got me the outlet ID (Ashfield NSW), but I am still to find where the receipt number is. I’m not sure there is one.

Though this is what I entered on the feedback form, I was then reminded of some details that escaped me at the time of the filling it. For the sake of completeness, they are as follows.

1. The attendant had to wait for the manager to come back from lunch; nobody appeared to have shown up by the time we finished.
2. She first said I’d have to go home and re-print my documents, before a colleague suggested she gave me one of the official forms.