‘An Post is holding onto my package. I have no idea how to get out of this nightmare’

We have a frustrating story from a person who has found our postal service wanting. He describes it as a Kafkaesque situation.

“My sister sent me my foreign sim card that I had left back in the UK from Edinburgh post office with Royal Mail signed and tracked service on September 19th. Royal Mail neither asked her for nor included an electronic customs form with the package. So when it arrived at the Dublin sorting office a week later, on September 25th, it was deemed undeliverable. So far, it’s the sender and Royal Mail’s fault and rightly it should be returned to sender,” he says.

“The drama starts from this point. Upon numerous contacts with An Post, we were told that there’s no way we could provide that information or pay customs fees if deemed applicable to release it, nor can they return it to the UK in a predictable manner. ‘We will return it when we can, but it’ll be a while’ was the answer we kept getting.”

He contacted us more than two weeks after the sim card had been posted to say “this small, letter-sized package is sitting in the Dublin sorting office for two weeks, neither being delivered nor returned. An Post agents on their webchat keep refusing to help or indicate any time frame for return. The agent on the phone gave conflicting information, said there was no sender address (incorrect: my sister wrote the return address on the back of the letter), and refused to help or say when it will be returned to sender.”

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He notes that this “tiny but very important sim card has been stuck in Royal Mail and An Post hell for three weeks, with An Post holding it hostage for the past two weeks refusing to either deliver or return it to sender. We have no idea how to get out of this nightmare, as we need this sim card for online banking and we are completely stuck now.”

We contacted An Post to see if it might have some advice for our reader but at the time of writing his sim card was still stranded in no-man’s land.