![]() You need to contact the shoe company and get them to change the name instead.”Īt this point, we were getting quite annoyed. “According to the system, this parcel was sent from a shoe company, not from you. Photo: Tomas Oneborg/SvD/TTĪ few days later, he got a reply. My shoes were on a shelf like this five minutes away from my apartment for two months. He doesn’t speak Swedish, so I drafted an email for him to send to Postnord. I sighed, thanked them for their time and called my dad. “You’re not the sender of the parcel, so you’ll have to ask the sender to change the name instead”. “We can’t change the name,” they informed me. Later that day, I called their number, and was met with a 45 minute phone queue – understandable, considering this was just before Christmas, and just before the UK was due to leave the EU, so they were undoubtedly bogged-down with calls asking about customs information.Įventually, I got through and explained the issue. In practice, I didn’t get the parcel until February, two months after he ordered it. In theory, this was a good idea, saving postal costs for him and saving the environmental impact of two journeys instead of one. To make postage easier, he decided to order them directly from the website to my address in Sweden, rather than ordering them to my parents’ home in the UK first. Last year, my dad sent me a pair of trainers as a Christmas present. Scroll down to read some of my best (or worst?) stories. ![]() This has led to some infuriating discussions at my local supermarket where I pick up my parcels, with postal service workers refusing to hand over my post for a number of seemingly trivial reasons. This can be extremely irritating, but actually makes sense in my opinion – if the postal service can’t confirm that the recipient lives at the address, then how do they know that important post isn’t being delivered to the wrong person? With vital documents such as bank cards and pin numbers still being delivered by post, this is actually a smart protective measure against identity theft and fraud.Īs you may expect, my friends and family at home find this hard to believe, as they are used to a system where the name on the parcel is completely unimportant. ![]() Not being listed on this register is the reason why some people living in Sweden without a personnummer sometimes may have trouble receiving post. Here, parcel delivery and the postal service is closely linked to the folkbokföringsregistret – the population register, where everyone living in Sweden with a personnummer (a Swedish identity number) is listed with their name and current address. This isn’t just postal service workers being difficult – their IT system will not approve parcel delivery if this ID doesn’t match. ![]() The name on your parcel must match the name on your ID, or they will refuse to hand over your parcel. Sweden, however, could not be more different. This means that the British postal service, Royal Mail, does not have a country-wide population register against which they can check addresses against the names of the people who actually live there. The closest we have to this system is a census is carried out once a decade, supplemented by the electoral register, listing registered voters’ address and name. I suspect that this is partly due to the fact that the UK has no up-to-date records of all residents, with their full legal name tied to their current address. These letters always reached me without issue, as the UK’s postal service, Royal Mail, is relatively unbothered about whether the name on the post matches the name of the recipient. Friends have sent letters to me addressed to all manner of nicknames based on my name, Becky, with “ Beckminsterfullerene” a particular highlight. In the UK, where I grew up, parcel delivery regulations are relatively loose.
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