Regulars - Mr Grateful

Two or three times a week, Mr Grateful will waddle in to the post office. Our faces will fall. If it's a Thursday, he'll be clutching his chequebook and if it's any other day it'll be a handful of mail. So far, so not annoying. Allow me to explain why he bugs me so much. Unlike practically everyone else in the world, he's not managed to get his head round the concept of withdrawing money using a card. No no no, that's far to 1980's for out Mr Grateful. He's mastered cheques and that's as modern as he's ever going to get. We can cash cheques for certain banks over the counter at the post office. However, it's a bloody faff. It requires about 20 times more button presses till-side than a card based withdrawal and exactly a metric shit load of writing. And then to take up even more of my valuable time, he can't have a nice round amount, he's got to have some stupid odd amount of cash and then have it broken down into some bizarre varying denominations of notes and coins.

Throughout the transaction he'll be repeatedly thanking us and saying that he's very grateful (hence the nickname). Tell you what, we'll be grateful if you could learn how to withdraw cash like normal people and have a sensible amount as well.

However, this isn't quite annoying enough. If he's sending letters then he's go to have a proof of posting for it. No matter how trivial said letter is. It really gets on my tits that he thinks so little of the postal service (yeah, ok it's not perfect but still) that he's gotta get a proof of posting for everything. It makes me want to deliberately chuck his mail in the bin. So that's more of my time wasted.

The final nail in the coffin is his BT bills. This is a pretty small point but does excellently sum up the small-mindedness of the man. He posts off the payment for his phone bills every quarter. He could pay those over the counter. Does he want to do that? Does he want to save himself the cost of a stamp? Does he want to make sure that his bill is paid there and then without ANY RISK of getting lost in the post?

Does he buggery.

Why not?

Simple. He's not pleased with the idea of paying the £4.50 per quarter that BT charge for paying via any method other than direct debit. Therefore he pays his bill in the post and always encloses a letter to this effect. I'm sure BT couldn't give a fuck.

"look Bill, it's a letter moaning about the money we charge for the privilege of paying your bill."

"Hmm, well as it appears to be with the payment so I suggest that we chuck the rant in the bin."

"Super"

If you're going to moan about stuff then do it in a way that will actually work. Ideally, try swapping over phone suppliers. Even better, swap over to the post office homephone service and make me a few quid into the bargain.

Grateful twat.