Having had my stay extended at short notice, it emerged that I have a slight administrative conundrum: The “vehicle license” (fancy name for car tax) for the ford (the one car that is parked on the public highway) expires on the 30th April, and I get back to blighty on the 1st of May. Unfortunately, the post office shuts around midday on Saturdays and all day Sunday so I can’t put in the forms until the 3rd of May. I had intended to leave it for the weekend and pay on the Monday, if necessary picking the window with the middle-aged spinster and fluttering my eyelashes a bit. I’ve done this before (well, the being a little bit late on the car tax part anyway) and it’s never been a problem. I couldn’t quite remember the grace period, but knew you could certainly get away with a couple of weeks late.

In conversation with some fellow brits though, it seemed the rules had been tightened up and I could look forward to a ruthlessly efficient, cold, computerised fine on my doormat at the stroke of zero-oh-hundred hours and no minutes on the 1st. So I looked into it and indeed there are new rules as of the 1st of Jan: basically, the DVLA ahave pulled their databases together, and now are able to tell if you own a car but haven’t taxed it or declared it off road. So I reluctantly put the ever faithful and hard-working Sam on the case, to try and sort out the required documents from my home (I THINK I’d set them aside in anticipation of some such situation, but it was so long ago now…) and to watch out for the reminder that the DVLA very considerately send during the month leading up to the expiry.

This afternoon, I received the reminder. In Santa Barbara. The forwarding I set up is to expire on the 14th of April. Yes, that was 10 days ago. Did this single letter take 10 days to get here when others took only 5? Or is the condo going to continue to receive important documents long after I’ve gone? I wish I had the paperwork to hand right now for the forwarding “service”, which I’d requested (sometime around 15th March) to start “as soon as possible” and end on the 14th. Instead I got a card from the royal mail weeks later stating the forwarding service would run from something like the 9th April to the 14th… and now items are still showing up nearly two weeks after that date! Bleh!?

The really exasperating thing is that if I wrote to the royal mail, kicked up a stink, got on watchdog, and had the prime minister as a personal friend, the way they’d “fix” this is by sacking a middle manager and throwing a bunch of money at a consultant’s report, having hastily robbed some other needy and failing part of the service. What is really needed is an engineer to look at the system they have and fix it. Just a fairly bright regular joe with the time and the access to examine where the information and the pieces of paper go. But this option doesn’t tranform well into politician and shareholder-friendly rhetoric so will not be chosen.

On the bright side, the letter contains a leaflet from the DVLA explaining that “If you don’t renew your tax disc within a month of the previous one expiring…” so I reckon I DO have a couple of days’ grace.

Score:
Post Office: -1 for slackness and being closed nearly all the time I’m not in an office
Royal Mail: -2 for failing to start forwarding “as soon as possible” and failing to stop forwarding at their agreed date
DVLA: +1 for allowing and documenting a grace period, +1 for sending timely reminders