Fergus Cassidy

Post haste

IN Columbus, Ohio, there's a small bookshop at the junction of Franklin Avenue and Bryden Road, and inside there's a book belonging to me sitting snugly on a shelf. Outside Skelmersdale, Lancashire, there's a house with a box of CDs lying on the living room floor. One of these is also mine.

By mine, I mean I've ordered and paid for them using various online sites. The only thing to do now is wait for the little green An Post van to swing into the yard of a morning.

I've always been trigger happy when ordering books and CDs online, but since Christmas I've switched to buying secondhand instead of new whenever I can. I've bought forests of books over the years but when I looked at my credit card statement for last December, I vowed to turn over a new leaf in 2005. I'm still trigger happy with the credit card, only now I don't break out in a cold sweat when the statements arrive.

What I also enjoy is the randomness of when the books will arrive and in what order. I can open two or three 'your order has shipped' emails on the same day from the same part of the world, but who knows how long it'll be before they arrive? It doesn't bother me.

It bothers the courier companies though. Specifically, wasting valuable time driving up and down country lanes trying to find places called 'Hillcrest' or 'Rose Cottage'. They hate it. I hate it too.

The phone will ring as early as 8.30am and will keep ringing on the hour like a news bulletin. I'm stuck, sometimes for hours, on the end of the phone repeating 'no you've gone too far' until I'm hoarse, cursing the day I placed the order.

Couriers lack of local knowledge will cost them dearly when the Irish postal system is de-regulated in a few years. That's why there's a push on now to get a post code system up and running smoothly by then. A price tag of Euro50m is being put on its implementation, which naturally will be paid from the state's coffers.

In the talk so far about such a system, much has been made of the so-called problems with identifying addresses and how it will lead to faster and more efficient delivery. That may well be true but there are other trade-offs which don't appear on the financial balance sheet for Operation Postcode.

There have been fears expressed that townland and hinterland names will disappear. It has also been suggested that postcodes are cold and impersonal arbiters of place or home.

Like any technology - and postcodes linked to Global Positioning Satellite mapping facilities is right up there - is all depends on how it's used. Who is it useful for and what's the cost/advantage ratio.

It's hard, though, to get to that point, blocked as it is by the new religion of 'the bottom line'. Postcodes are supposed to be modern, so we must therefore genuflect at the altar of progress and don't question our newly-found fate.

The impersonal aspect to adopting a postcode system lies in the inability to be clear on its social consequences. If addresses become no more than a series of Xs and Ys in the eyes of couriers, there will be less eyes to watch out for, say, an elderly or handicapped person living alone.

Postal workers are familiar with the people on their routes. They're not social workers but they play an important role in the health and welfare of a community. And yet bypassing this kind of valuable local knowledge is not considered as a cost. In terms of future social welfare and/or medical budgets it most certainly is. Who'll pay for that? Not the couriers or the postcode pushers.

As I write, Jim has arrived with the post and departed with a wave of his hand as the van snakes on down the lane toward Murphy's. It's a book I forgot I ordered. Around the World in 80 Days. Jim would chuckle if he knew.

He would do a lot more than that if it was still in the letterbox tomorrow morning.