Following a tip off from another teacher it would appear that I am able to vote in the upcoming UK General Election. I read all the necessary forms and details before answering key questions on a on-line form. Within in 24 hours my application to vote had been accepted, all I had to do was to apply to Wolverhampton City Council for a postal vote. However there were two big challenges that faced me before being able to do that: printing and posting the form.
A while ago we had a new all singing, all dancing printer installed in the office. The old printer used to do old fashioned things like print documents when you sent them to print from ones laptop without delay. However in the fast changing world that we live in this was deemed to not be progressive enough and so an ID badge system was installed instead. All one has to do now to print is to send the document to print, switch the printer off energy saving mode, scan one’s ID card on the scanner, bemoan the slowness of the thing, press the profile button, wait while the printer detects the document, swear loudly, press the refresh button, swear loudly again, remind the computer that it should be printing, put the kettle on, press refresh again, and eventually out comes the printed document, often printed on both sides of the paper because I had forgotten to press the correct button. Naturally the printing of the postal vote form followed the above procedure.
Having filled in the forms and found an envelope all I had to do next was buy a stamp. Conveniently today is Monday, an obviously good day to post letters, and also a good day for travelling into central KL for Edwin’s weekly ballroom dance lesson. Equally conveniently there a whopping great Pos Malaysia depot right next to the station. There were loads of different places and offices on show, none of which appeared to sell stamps so I asked one uniformed Pos Malaysia bloke where we could buy a stamp. He told me to "go to floor two, over there.” I had been caught out like this before, believing what someone in a uniform tells me, so asked another person, in a different office who replied "go to floor two, over there.” We found a lift and found floor two and even found over there, which was a highly polished, gleaming post office with loads of counters and staff everywhere. Bingo. The immediate snags that faced Edwin and I though were the various benches, with various people sitting on them waiting to be served. We printed off a ticket number and studied the “next number” screen. Our ticket read 6132. There were three, four figure numbers on display, the highest number on display read 5800. Confusingly our ticket told us that the number before ours was 6123. Not able to make much sense of the displays and tickets, but looking at the blank a vacant faces on the waiting masses and the blank faces on the staff behind the counters busy trying to look as if they were doing something I knew we would be in for a long wait. Clutching the ticket we explored. We found a car tax and insurance office. We found an automatic stamp label printing service, with no information about how much a letter to GB was. We found post boxes. Finally we found the philately counter. It was worth a try. Amazingly the smiling person was quite happy to sell us souvenir, pretty stamps, priced at RM2 and we left the counter pleased not to be part of the waiting with the crowds. As we left that particular part of the PO I took a quick look back, just in case i wanted to remember where to buy stamps in the future. There was a sign above reading “My Stuff.” Splendid personal service.