Moaning about the SA Post Office is about as productive as moaning about Telkom. Your voice will not even register on the mountains of decades old whinging. But I do understand the need to do it – it’s more therapeutic than anything else.

I don’t really deal with the SA Post Office because I don’t post letters, and when I buy things online from overseas, I use Postbox Courier to bring it to me from the US and UK postal addresses they’ve assigned me.

But when I received a wedding invitation with an RSVP date that expired weeks before the letter arrived, I could have been close to tears. Had we just missed the wedding of the year in the south of France?

Look, thank goodness our bride and groom had the good sense to contact each guest individually on WhatsApp, steering them to a bespoke website which offered details of the event and a chance to digitally RSVP. I chatted to the groom and it seems the online version was not a backup, but rather the main face of the wedding, with the physical invite merely being a bit of fun tradition.

He (smartly) was never relying on the invite as formal means of communications. Much like having a physical version of a book on your shelf, but then reading it on your iPad, a physical invite sent in the post (certainly to South Africa) is largely for show.

Think about that. The SA Post Office is so bad that people use it purely for sentimental / traditional purposes. “In the olden days, people used to do it like this, but we can’t rely on that so we’re doing it for fun – even if it never gets to the destination.”

What a tragic reality.

Wedding invite sent from the US in February

So this invite got to me at the end of May and it was sent from the US in February. That’s almost five months. For a letter. If the bride and groom were relying on this as formal communications, they would have been alone at their wedding, as nobody would have sent an RSVP to attend.

How fortunate that we don’t actually have to RELY on the SA Post Office, and how divine that they keep it open so we can play with it and ‘make pretend’, as they did in the old days.

I can see where this is all going – people will start using Postbox Courier to send letters, rather than just overseas online purchases being delivered to your door in three to five working days.

When my daughter gets married one day, they will probably do the same thing, but with email.

Because, let’s face it, who actually still emails?