2 Hours Wait For Utility Bills Payment At Local Post Office

Mom is still paying utility bills manually, whether at post office, or at Bank Simpanan Nasional.

When I am home, I’ll either help paying the bills, or chauffeur her to do the necessary.

Why manual, in this new era of automation and on-line payment? Because she wants to see payment stamp on the bills, that’s why.

Today was an extremely bad day at the post office, because the day before was a public holiday in KL. At 12.54pm, she got a queue number 2222 from queue ticket dispenser machine. And they were only serving queue number 2136 at that time.

86 queue numbers in between of us, god bless. And this has yet to take into account of the queue numbers for road tax and driving license renewal, other financial transactions, etc, etc.

You see …. there are only 3 (operating) counters at this particular post office.

– 2 counters are on sharing basis, for utility bills, road tax renewal, etc, etc and

– 1 dedicated counter for postal services.

At least we are allowed to get a queue number for the first 2 counters, without having to line up.

You will need leg strength for the postal service counter, as there is no queue number system. And if you need to use both counters, you need to queue separately.

Knowing that it will be a long, loooong wait, mom and I took our time walking around. We went to a pharmacy, a supermarket, and even spent quite substantial time at Daiso. In between these places, we took turn walking to the post office, to check on the queue number status. No luck.

After 1 hour of shopping, we had enough, and finally walked back to the post office and sat there waiting for a good one hour.

Mom was initially grumbling, and after a while, accepted her fate, and sat quietly. I just switched on my zen mode, and used the time drafting out my blog post.

We were finally attended to at 3pm, a looong 2 hours from our arrival time.

I cannot imagine people spending 2 hours, waiting physically at the post office.
Malaysians can be a patient bunch, don’t we? There were few grumblers and whiners amongst the crowd, but most of them just wait patiently.

God speed our friends at our local Post Office. Perhaps more counters, more staff, or simply a little bit more of efficiency pills?

Update Aug 2016

There are now queue numbers for postage service; an improvement much appreciated.

When I was there on a weekday afternoon around 1.40pm, 5 out of 6 counters were in operation. Counter 3 was dedicated for bill payments. When Counter 4 was not used for postage, they also attended to bill-payment customers. Took me around 16 minutes for bill payments.