T BAGGED BY POSTMEN?

Managing to get hold of festival tickets is tricky enough - but then you've got to hope the things actually turn up. And that's where the Royal Mail comes in. Or maybe doesn't.

Two postal workers left the service after they were mysteriously found to have six pairs of tickets for One Big Weekend in Dundee; now, T in the Park tickets are going missing.

Brian Ferguson, 21, of Bathgate fears he'll miss out. - despite buying his two-day ticket and camping permit via a Ticketmaster website in February.

The postie brought the ticket to his door on Saturday June 10, but there was nobody in to sign for it.

When Brian went to the sorting office two days later, he was told it had not been returned from his local post office. He was later told the ticket had been lost.

The same sorting office, in Bathgate, has had two other complaints of missing tickets made against it. The Royal Mail have promised to investigate. The botched handling of the One Big Weekend fiasco doesn't give very much confidence, though. The local paper tried to alert mail managers to a problem only to be told that there was no way postmen would be pinching the tickets, because they were in plain, white envelopes and so unidentifiable. You've got to love the Royal Mail, haven't you? Told that some of its staff are pilfering, the response isn't "our staff are honest and would never do that" but "our employees are too dull to work out that the 10,000 identical envelopes suddenly appearing in the system on the day the tickets are being sent out would have the tickets in them." And, although they did eventually discover two men apparently stealing mail, they were allowed to resign quietly rather than be subjected to a proper, legal investigation.

What's especially hateful about this is that the Royal Mail's relaxed attitude to some of its crappier staff reflects on all its employees. Because the company doesn't deal with its few problem workers effectively, it contributes to an unfair sense that anyone carrying a blue and red sack is probably only doing so having first checked for birthday cards and cheques in the contents.

And while they do offer compensation in these cases, that's not entirely generous since they can fund their panaceas by sticking the price of stamps up again. Every letter you send is subsidising bent postal worker's jaunts to the summer festivals.

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