GEORGE HAYTER: Time to stamp out postcards! (From Hampshire Chronicle)

GEORGE HAYTER: Time to stamp out postcards!

3:36pm Wednesday 9th May 2007 in News

THIS column has a long history of giving tips on how to save you money, so here's another one.

Don't send postcards.

Everyone knows they take so long to get to their destination that you're usually back in Blighty long before your cards find their way here.

I remembered this when I arrived in New Zealand for a three-week holiday on March 27, and I vowed to send my postcard to my colleagues at the NewsExtra office ASAP. I didn't want to be back at work before my card got there.

But that's exactly what happened. I returned to work on April 16, but the card didn't turn up until May 3. That means it took five weeks.

I've no proof of this, as the card bears no postmark in the accepted sense of wavy lines with the date sent - just an orange barcode-thing.

And neither can the postal authorities blame me for putting an incomplete address. By an amazing feat of data recovery, I recalled the postcode correctly, despite having followed my usual holiday policy of deleting everything about work from my brain.

So tell your friends about the chap in the local paper whose card took five weeks to arrive and that, as a consequence, you realise postcards are no longer a viable form of communication.

For that reason, tell them, you will never send one again.

The cost saving may not be significant, but the saving in time will be huge. Trying to think of what to say and then getting down to actually writing it are only a small part of the work.

Postcards have been known to ruin holidays because whole days are spent combing foreign towns in a bid to find somewhere that sells stamps.