WHEN PIGS FLY

If you are expecting a mail from the Northern Cyprus postal services in METU NCC, Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus, you will get it when pigs fly. So you had better stop waiting and go to the campus post office and pick it up in person because they do not deliver the post. When i discovered this, Amazon had already sent me a replacement for my order that i mistakenly thought was late for the estimated delivery date. I had ordered a book for one of my courses from the website of Amazon UK, a company that sells books and goods through the Internet, and was expecting it to arrive in ten days after placing the order. But it did not. Moreover, i waited in vain for another ten days after the expected delivery date, impatiently and fretfully asking the security guards at the reception desk of my dormitory every day if they had received it. Having lost all my hope, i finally ended up informing Amazon of the lateness and my disappointment and frustration at it. Fortunately, this company is brilliant at customer services. They take customer complaints very seriously. So they immediately sent me another copy of the book free of charge as well as using the fastest shipping method that they call 'priority express' without much questioning any probable reasons for this lateness. Delivery was going to take only three days at most this time. While waiting for the new shipment, i learned to my astonishment that the mail, whether they are letters or packages, are not delivered by the METU NCC post office and i had to go there to get any of them. And i did so. It was very annoying to find out that the first package had been there for two weeks for me to pick up without my knowledge. I received two books for the price of one in the end. Amazon probably considers the first shipment as lost in the post. However, this situation should not be agreeable to any side involved in such a business and i now see it a moral responsibility to return one of them. But i have to pay for postage. In this case, the Northern Cyprus mail is paid twice, by Amazon and me, for a package that was not delivered and therefore needs returning. This would normally be a disgrace to a private company which values its customers. But the state-run business NC Mail seems not to care at all, getting money from people but not providing necessary services in return and most importantly, in spite of unacceptably causing inconveniences that have the potential of causing a loss of trust between a reputable company and its customers. In addition to the nuisance of going to the post office for yourself, another example of the faults in their services could be the fact that you can only receive parcels that are thought to contain items that may require paying customs on on Mondays. That means, if a parcel arrives in the post office on a Tuesday for example, you will have to wait until next Monday to be able to get it after being inspected by a customs officer as if i had not been checked and approved at the place it was posted or gone through any x-ray scanners at the airports. Besides, they will charge a fee for this even though all the postage on it has been paid by the sender. Lastly, i think that i need to share another experience with this post office with those who might be considering using its services. While it is possible for a mail from United Kingdom to arrive in Northern Cyprus via Istanbul just in two days, it once took three days for a letter of mine to arrive in Istanbul from here, which is relatively a short distance when compared to the UK-Istanbul-TRNC route. The irony is that i had posted it as 'APS', short for 'acele posta servisi', rapid postal service. As a result, i now tend to be in two minds about dealing with them again. So, they should consider a major overhaul of their services to help me make my mind, i suppose.