Going postal on yourself. (This is so sad.)

Not that I think about it all that often, but when I do think

about Britain's Post Office, I think about the charming, iconic red letter boxes that are still fairly ubiquitous in the UK. That and the small town postmasters, postmistresses, and letter carriers who would have been at home in a Barbara Pym novel, or in one of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia stories.

But all has not been sweetness and light with the British PO.

From around 1999 to 2015, hundreds of people who worked at Post Office branches were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on evidence from a defective information technology system. Some went to prison or were forced into bankruptcy. Others lost their homes, suffered health problems or breakdowns in their relationships or became ostracized by their communities. (Source: NBC News)

The bad software automated sales accounting, and when the system showed a shortfall in a branch, the manager was accused of thievery and required to repay the loss. Overall, about 1,000 employees were convicted based on bad data. 

Postmasters caught up in the scandal had pushed back, reporting problems with the system, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. Senior managment kept calm and carried on with the prosecutions and convictions. 

The Post Office's problems, and the scandal around all those thieving postal employees, were fairly widely know, but a 2024 "TV docudrama propelled the scandal to national headlines and galvanized support for victims."

The repercussions of the faulty system were far worse than wrongly-accused employees having to pay back money they didn't owe. In the US, someone might well have gone postal. But in Britain, they went postal on themselves. "At least 13 people were thought to have taken their own lives as a result of Britain's Post Office scandal."  In addition, 59 others thought about suicide but didn't go through with it. 

Now, a government report has been published and there is legislation proposed to overturn the convictions and repay the victims. 

Jo Hamilton, a former Post Office manager and a lead campaigner [for the wrongly-accused], said that the report "shows the full scale of the horror that they unleashed on us."

There is, of course, no compensation that can make up for the soul-crushing impact of being wrongly accused, especially for the families of those who killed themselves in the aftermath. 

This is a story about not listening to the underlings when they say something's wrong. It's about misplaced faith in technology. 

I think of all those poor Post Office employees, in the crowded city precints and in the leafy little fictional towns of Barbara Pym and E.F. Benson. I think of all those iconic little letter boxes. It's all so incredibly sad. 

 

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Image Source: Castings SA