Hardly worth the Candle

Talking with our lady Sacristan today about the difficulty she has found, trying to acquire a new Paschal Candle. Ordering is dead easy. You just go online and click the boxes and all is done in a trice. Order and payment all sorted. Easy-peasy.

But Delivery ? Oh, that is a quite different kettle of fish. Not so bad if they send by Parcel Force or whatever idiot new name someone overpaid nit-wit has decided to call the Royal Mail these days. They will try to deliver to your door, and if that proves impossible they actually have a depot nearby where you can collect your errant parcels. But what of the myriad parcel carriers who are trying to replace the Mail ? If your supplier uses one of them, and their carrier thinks no one is home to receive a bundle because their operative won’t wait long enough for you to hear the doorbell, and struggle in from the garden to get to the front door (as the dear old postman, who was familiar with his round and its people, was able to do) - well finding their depot can be a nightmare, because it will usually be miles away.

So what do we really gain by the speed of online ordering? If the order is quick but the delivery fraught with delay, nothing at all, it seems. We might as well just order from a real person standing in a real (if old fashioned) shop, and go collect when they tell us the goods have arrived. Like we always did, before some fool told us that the Net was bound to be always somehow better, phone calls to automated menu systems would be ‘better’ than calls to a real person (in England!!) and that competition between carriers would benefit everyone. We aren’t very good at making effective, thoughtful use of modern technology, are we?

Some things we have found good ways to use, I grant you. eMail is a boon; there are minuses, but overall I think it is a benefit for its speed and flexibility. But what happened to the paperless electronic Office? My impression is that we still print shed loads of unnecessary paper. Nearly 20 years ago I urged that our diocese should stop sending out so much paperwork, and start using electronic media (in those days it would have been floppy discs, which computers once used, perhaps before you were born) to disperse information. We are getting there, slowly, after all this time. I still sometimes get large envelopes full of paper from the diocesan offices, though.

There is political meddling in all this, of course. But part of what makes it possible for politicians to get away with their notions of efficiency is our common illusion - I was going to say obsession, but illusion is the right word - our illusion that speed is somehow intrinsically beneficial, when in fact it simply aint. Try ordering a Paschal Candle over the internet.