My first POS Malaysia experience

Today I paid my first visit to POS Malaysia aka the post office. Until now I've managed to avoid the place and my only experience with mail has been waiting (a frustratingly long time) for things to get delivered from Australia.

True story: My best friend sent me a beautiful parcel of Christmas presents 2 weeks before Christmas. When did I receive it? The 31st January. I rest my case.

Back to the post office. Now I've stood in my fair share of queues and dealt with several unfriendly, unhelpful or slower-than-a-snail members of staff at the post office back in Sydney. But today was a brand new experience.

When I arrived I noticed the entire place was full of people sitting or standing, but all of them waiting and only a handful getting served as half the counters were unattended and even those that were, occasionally the staff member would casually get up and share a joke with a colleague or seemingly do nothing. There were at least half a dozen or more people standing outside in the mall as well. Clearly things could take a while.

My next problem was that I had no idea what I was meant to do. All I wanted was some stamps to mail a card. Looking around, I saw an electronic ticket display calling numbers in turn with a designated counter next to it. A-ha. I looked around for about 5 minutes and eventually found the ticket dispenser tucked away behind a crowd of people in the corner of the post office with no sign.

Not needing to pay a bill, that ruled out pressing B so I pressed A. Armed with my ticket I happily went to stand outside and wait. Another electronic display read: "stamps, parcels. Please press button A"

Note the punctuation, it's important for the story. I read it and thought, yes I pressed A, I'm all good.

Another 10 minutes went past and the ticket numbers being called out slowly went up towards 1425 which I was holding. An automated female voice announced each ticket and counter as they were called on the machine, although it was all in Bahasa Malaysia. Was it my imagination or did she sound cranky too?

After I had been standing outside the post office for what seemed like forever, I observed a European man who had just been called up to one of the 'multi-service' counters getting rather fired up at the guy behind the counter. Why? He wanted to buy stamps and after waiting half an hour, had just been told that stamps were only being sold at counter 5 which you didn't need a ticket for, you simply had to join the queue.

Aha. I looked back at the electronic sign and saw it actually read:

"Please queue at counter 5 for the following: POS express, registered post," -display changes- "stamps, parcels. Please press button A" 

Aha.

I threw away my useless ticket and hurried to join the queue at counter 5 in front of the cranky European gentleman. 45 minutes later, I was finally out of there with my card stamped and sent off to Japan (I really hope it gets there). 

POS Malaysia, you need to invest in bigger and better signs that don't show half a sentence at a time, and have more staff working so people aren't spilling out into the streets while they are waiting. That was way too much work for a card, imagine if I ever had to send a parcel!