Russian Post-apocalyptic Post (it's called "snail mail" for a reason!)

So, I had to go to a post office to receive a payment from Google (my first one, but how I had to temper with settings for 3 months to get my money sent to me and how they do it via POST, is another story), and spent nearly an hour standing in a line. It was my city's central post office, so it's a huge one, full of (not working) counters and people looking for a right counter to stand in a line to. The lines are huge, because stuff like paying bills or receiving money - the kind of business that attracts a lot of people - are done by a single clerk, while at least 60% of workplaces are unmanned or there's 2-3 people doing nothing, with no customers wanting the kind of things these clerks do.

Those working counters are all unmarked. There's a ticket system supposed to give you a place in a corresponding line to the right counter, but I never seen it actually working. It's supposed to tell you which clerk does what, but the station is always frozen with some error, or just plain broken. And with those unmarked counters the only way to know where is the right one is either to ALREADY know it, or to stand in a line to discover after 30 minutes of standing that it was the wrong line and wrong counter. Right what always happens to me, always. I so much hate lines!

Then, the paperwork... To receive my money I had to fill up a few forms, they had fields saying what I need to fill in - part of my passport's data, mostly. But when I turned the forms in, they were rejected because I was supposed to fill in more data, NOT mentioned in those forms whatsoever. I asked, where I am supposed to write this data, when there's no appropriate fields in those forms for that kind of data. Oh, the clerk said, you write it wherever you want, just all over it. Why do I even need to write anything if the forms don't mention it? Because the federal law needs it, she said! Then why on fucking Earth don't they have some normal forms with all the fields required by law?! They're probably printing more of them each month! Fuck my brain, this is madness! No, this is Russia!!!

People of Russia hate Russian post. Here are some pictures circulating around the Internets. Mouseover for a translation.

Oh, and while I'm at it, there's nothing like receiving a parcel by Russian post service. There's a 50% chance they'll fuck up the delivery and no one will be able to find your shipment ever again. In fact, I think they have some vast underground facility where Russian post service is secretly developing a portal gun, which they test on randomly selected shipments. A couple of years ago, me and my husband ordered custom-tailored dry suits for scuba diving from Germany. They were about 1800$ a piece, quite expensive price tag for Russia. Plus, it was a huge package and how far is it from Germany to Russia? I mean, my grandfather walked all the way up to Berlin during WWII, and they now have things like planes and trains all over the place.

After a couple of months of us not receiving the suits, the company that sent them began searching for the package. They failed to find any trace of it after it crossed the border and had to produce a second set of suits for us for free. That second set did found its way to us, but the first one never surfaced anywhere.

Dad once ordered some seats for his fishing boat from an Australian online shop - a huge package too - and they were lost and had to be replaced for free again. God bless those sellers who replace lost things... Once I ordered a bandana from CCP's Eve Online merchandise shop, it was lost too on the way and they even refused to give me a tracking number of the package they sent, so i could search for it from my said, not mentioning to refuse to even search for it by themselves - the overall attitude was just short of openly telling me to go and fuck myself. Nothing like a Russian post service together with CCP's outstanding customer support, I tell you...

Also, I never received a pay check on 50$ from an online company I worked with, they sent me the money in February - I did not receive them - and they're just gone, like sucked in the black hole that Russian post service is.

Things are often just stolen outright or used before they reach their destination. If you subscribed to a magazine, receiving it with a broken package or even with pages torn out is not uncommon: post service workers want to read too, after all! There was a huge scandal in our city when Ozon.ru (Russian analogue of Amazon.com) found out that some worker in the central post office ransacked their packages, replaced contents with garbage and papers to match those packages' weight, and sent them back, like unclaimed, stealing stuff worth about 5000$. It appeared that the thief wasn't even officially hired(!), just replacing someone on a long sick leave. 

Oh, and also delivery time... Once a parcel from China came in 14 days. The next time a parcel from the very same city came in 6 weeks. But it doesn't really matter, in Russia late delivery brings happiness nonetheless, because your package WAS delivered after all...