74 13 - 26 November 2019 [email protected]
while left unsupervised, and yet he too
insisted on sending the quotes in the
post “because I’m a bit old-school”.
I love my accountants. Avuncular
old Pete and his efficient assistant
Rachel are brilliant at patiently dealing
with my lifelong aversion to making
money (I do
words, not
numbers, as I
told them at our
first meeting).
They finally
convinced me to
stop running my
business on patchy
Excel spreadsheets
and move to the online accounting
system Xero instead, which has cut the
amount of time I spend on tedious
admin such as invoicing and filling in
VAT returns enormously. Rachel can log
into Xero and correct my inevitable
errors (“no, Barry, you can’t claim
a six-pack of Wagon Wheels as aBarry Collins is fed up of dealing with
businesses that prefer postbox to inbox
Page 404
business expense”) and everything is
submitted electronically.
And yet, every time they write to me
or send me an invoice, it comes through
my letterbox on bits of paper that the
dog will inevitably chew, or that I won’t
see under the mountains of pizza menus
and appeals to save donkeys in
Derbyshire.
Why is this? How can these
businesses – which are selling and
working with cutting-edge technologies- rely on a postal system that is woefully
inefficient, more costly and less
convenient for the person on the
receiving end? What has trackable,
searchable, instantaneous email ever
done to them?
So, here’s my early resolution
for the new year (which I’m still
convinced is only 2006, by the way):
any company that insists on using the
aptly named snail mail won’t be getting
my business. I’ll write to them to let
them know, obviously.
H
ere we are on the cusp of
2020 – a date that still sounds
ridiculously futuristic to me – and
yet we’re still clinging to a mode
of communication that was invented
when the Pharaohs were knocking
around Egypt.
Email should have killed off the postal
service years ago. It’s certainly given it
a good kicking, to be fair, but I’m still
dealing with businesses that insist on
communicating via ‘snail mail’ for no
good reason whatsoever.
I’ve spent the past week getting
quotes for a new boiler. The first
company was referred to me by the
very forward-thinking energy supplier
Octopus (octopus.energy), which
literally changes my energy prices every
half an hour in line with demand, takes
all my readings via smart meters and
hasn’t sent me a single piece of paper in
the year I’ve been with them. The
company it recommended wants to
install a “smart boiler” and took a survey
of my house using a Skype-like app,
where the surveyor was on the other
end of a video link. Yet, when it came
to delivering the
quotes for the job,
the company said it
would send them in
the post – quotes
I’m still waiting for
almost a week later.
The same was
true of the second,
more local firm,
which came to price up the job. This
chap spent 10 minutes talking to me
about the benefits of installing a Hive
smart meter, relayed stories of how one
customer kept turning the heating down
at home while he was sitting on a beach
in Barbados, fearful that his stay-at-
home kids would be running up his bill Illustration: Andrew TorrensLet’s stamp out
snail mail in 2020
We’re still clinging
to a mode of communication
that was invented when the
Pharaohs were knocking
around Egypt