16.04.2020 Day 35 of self-isolation. Parcel delivery tyrants during pandemic!

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Thursday 16th 45F, early cloud clearing to blue skies and sunshine but rather breezy. A walk to thelanes under variable cloud.

A robin was singing in a garden tree. A shy bird in Denmark. Tame as any pet bird in Gravely Blighted. I actually spotted a Chiffchaff today. I could hear it in a roadside tree but could not see it.

Then it moved and I could follow it about in my binoculars. It called all the time it was moving. Perhaps as a location signal to a mate? A solitary Swallow was sitting in the same tree. The first I have seen this year.

The traffic was intermittent but much busier than recently. Another food parcel has arrived from another online supermarket. The pleasant young chap in the van knew the proper drill about social distancing.

Unlike the driver of a household name in parcel delivery: The driver entered the garden and insisted I personally sign his machine! I refused and kept backing away. I have asked him several times on previous occasions whether he had heard there was a pandemic. He had made no response to my question.

He gave up in the end and I was told to apply for a legal waiver, online, or there would be no more home deliveries! How did he know I was technically competent enough to do so? I suppose all pensioners in their mid-70s are fully conversant with computers and filling out PDF forms in a foreign language?

Guess what? The PDF I downloaded from their website was not authorized for manual entry of my details. I needed a PDF license from Acrobat to fill it out! So I did a screen grab, entered the details in image handling software and saved the result as a JPEG image.

Which I then sent back to the company attached to the email replying to theirs. Which had said the PDF I had sent them was blank! It wasn't blank when I sent it! They did not bother to respond to my email to confirm acceptance of my renewed application for a legal waiver of their responsibilities.

Then several days later, they left the legal waiver in our newspaper delivery pipe. The stiff, card, security envelope was bent in half and stuffed in the open pipe at the far end of the shared public drive! 60 yards from our home and our legally required post box on the outside of our garden gate! How did they know, as a member of a high risk group, in self-isolation, that I would risk leaving the safety of my detached rural home? Just to check for private mail left illegally in our newspaper delivery pipe?  

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