to think the Royal Mail sould have some answers for me?

[hillbilllyhell]

I sent a special delivery packet last week that has been lost, or delayed as they tell me. It has to be 10 working days before they can consider it lost. In this packet were crucial, original documents for dh's work permit from the Canadian Embassy. Without this document, the work permit application cannot proceed. The document, which is a FBI police certificate took us about 10 weeks to receive from the FBI. The FBI does not issue duplicates, and has told us that we will have to start the whole process over.

Dh's employer in Canada will not wait for this to happen and if the Royal Mail cannot find the packet then effectively dh will have his job offer withdrawn and will be out of work very soon when his current contract expires.

We did not make copies as the embassy very clearly has stated that they only will accept original documents. All the Royal Mail can tell me is that they are investigating what has happened. Apparently there was a mailbag with 3 special delivery packets in it, 1 of them being ours and none of the items in the bag have been scanned in or delivered. The mailbag left Edinburgh processing centre last Thurday and should have arrived at the West London processing centre the next day, according to all of the people I have spoken to at the Royal Mail.

So what next? They don't seem to be particularly bothered and cannot answer any of my questions regarding what happened and only tell me it won't be considered lost until the 27th of this month, after then I can claim back the £5.45 of potsage costs. This error could cost dh a massive setback in his career, and our life in general. Any suggestions?

If twitter man doesn't help go to the press, Only contacts I have are at the DM and very out of date (thankfully!). However I expect there are some journo's lurking around here so perhaps a call out to one of them might be of more use! Good Luck. I am not suprised you are furious and worried!

Well the Canadian embassy just informed dh that he has 30 days to supply these documents or his case will be rejected and closed. I need to put pressure on the Royal Mail to find my packet and get this in the papers. Where can I start?

Keep tweeting the RM tweeters. Also any point in contacting Stanstead - you said upthread that the RM thought it would have left on a flight to Stanstead. Perhaps your item is sitting in some sort of holding area there?

Also, is it worth phoning Canadian Embassy every day to check if it has arrived there? Would they phone you if it turned up - if not how would you know?

Just to add my own experience in, RM once lost a collection of identity documents (birth certificate, passport, immigration visa, medical vaccination certificate from what I remember) that I had paid special delivery to send to my sister 2 months before she flew abroad (and needed these documents with her, they'd been stored at our parent's house).

The package was lost, RM arsed around, investigated, we all tore our hair out in frustration, eventually the fucking package was found at MY LOCAL SORTING OFFICE.

Apparently it had never even left the city i posted it from.

This was a number of years ago now, but I do not have any faith in special delivery care because of it.

Have you informed RM of this deadline?

If you have and they are still arsing around then I would contact the Devils Male and see what happens!

Could you harness the power of twitter? Tweet something like the following mentioning the @ royal mail name you had success with last time:

e.g.

Twitter pls help! Must find special delivery parcel with life-changing docs lost by @royalmail. Reached Edinburgh processing office. Pls RT

The retweets could run into the hundreds (thousands?) and with the @ mention, it will really pile on the pressure to find your parcel.

Although if you are new to Twitter then I guess you won't have many followers to RT for you though....

I have informed RM of this deadline and they say it is "top priority" for them and I am trying to be positive about that statement and not cynical.

However I am a mess, crying a lot and not sleeping and I am generally not a worrier.

I have no followers on twitter and am just figuring how it works.

I am going tp see about contacting the press tomorrow. Anyne have any ideas about going about that or getting the message out on Twitter?

I don't know about my msp but I will try that too.

Thank you!!

Not on Twitter, but can you tell us your Twitter name so MNers on there can get this moving for you?

My twitter name is shannonmcleish. :)

Okay, then type this (or similar) into Twitter and 'send'.

Twitter pls help! Must find special delivery parcel with life-changing docs lost by @royalmail. Reached Edinburgh processing office. Pls RT

Then send a tweet to @MumsnetTowers asking them to RT the tweet for you (20,000 followers....!).

Of course doing this might annoy Royal Mail so they don't help you....

I never heard of Consequential Loss cover, thank you for whoever suggested it upthread for next time I send documents with RM.

OP, v good luck to you. If it is of any consolation, I have had numerous letters/packages delayed by Royal Mail, vast majority of which did turn up. I do send really important stuff with DHLitNow, absolutely brilliant.

Ok I have made the tweet but how do I send it to mumsnet towers and ask them to retweet?

I hope this packet shows up, in all the years I have used royal mail for ebay and everything else, nothing has ever been lost or even delayed!

I've found you! You really need to squeeze in 'Pls RT' at the end (please retweet) within your 140 characters, so people know to retweet it for you. You can delete that tweet (hover over it and click the 'delete' option) and then write it out again. The little counter shows how many characters you have left, you need to fit in all your words before it reaches zero.

Then type in

@mumsnettowers please could you RT my last tweet, relating to AIBU www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1386160

(i.e. include the link to this thread)

ooh, just to say, anything you do on Twitter is fully public, so by tweeting mumsnettowers with a link to this thread, royal mail (if they look at your profile) will become aware of this thread (but I'm guessing you probably won't mind that...)

I tweeted mumsnettowers last night but it doesn't appear to have been retweeted.

I can't find my tweet on their page, would they have deleted it?

It won't be on their page until they retweet it, I think. I tried to find you on Twitter just now but couldn't - if you want to link to me my username is the same as here.

OP, really hope you can get this back

Good idea!!

Well, RM has just updated me to tell me that they still haven't found my package but are really looking for it :(