Romtelecom & Posta Romana: Romania Past & Present

In the part of Bucharest in which we live there is a building that is modern Romania in microcosm. Known as Posta Vitan (Vitan Post Office) the building was one of many like it built in the 1960s by the then Ministry of Communications to house post offices, sorting offices and telephone exchanges. In those days (in fact, until the mid 1990s), all inter-regional and international telephone calls went through these buildings.

The building today serves much the same purpose: it houses a post office, a sorting office, a telephone exchange (now digital of course) and a Romtelecom shop.

Romtelecom, the national telephone company, was privatised many years ago (the first part was sold off in 1999). While not initially successful, Romtelecom has since become one of the most respected companies in Romania. It is difficult to find anyone with a bad word to say about it; its services are exemplary (we post our dispatches here via a Romtelecom internet connection – which never, ever goes down – and watch television via its Dolce satelite service).

Since being revamped a year or so ago, its store at Posta Vitan is bright, modern, and incredibly customer friendly. Staff have clearly been trained well and fall over themselves to help. Bureaucracy – especially in the number of documents you need to sign up for any services – has been cut to the bare bones. It’s all very impressive.

The same cannot be said for Posta Romana in the same building. Indeed, walking into any post office in Romania is the closest thing in Europe to time travel: in Romanian post offices it is still 1956.

Behind every counter is a generally unhelpful employee who apparently sees it as her job (it is always a her) to make your life as difficult as possible. If you have come to collect a parcel, or a recorded delivery letter, her job is to keep you from that parcel or letter for as long as possible. She can often appear to act as though she gets a bonus if she can stop you getting your hands on it altogether.

(And that’s if you can ever find out which counter you need to go to).

For in Romanian post offices there are always three or four counters, at which different kinds of transaction are carried out. There are no signs to tell you in which queue you need to stand: you take a chance and hope it is the right one (it usually isn’t).

And don’t expect to get anything done from 1pm-1:30pm: the dreaded ‘schimb de tura‘ takes place, with one batch of under-worked employees making way for another. There is no way any work can be done while this complicated maneuver (standing up and letting someone else sit down in your chair) is carried out.

Then of course there is the bureaucracy. Picking up a recorded letter is a particularly Kafkaesque experience.

Let’s say you work at Address 1. Someone sends you a recorded delivery letter to that address (it has to be recorded because the standard post service is so unreliable). To pick up that letter (addressed to you, at Address 1), you need an identity document showing you live at that address. Only you don’t live there, so you have no such document.

How is the problem solved?

You go back to the office, type up an Imputernicere for somebody else in the office, in which you state that you, Mr X, of Address 2, authorizes Mrs Y, of Address 3, to pick up the recorded delivery letter sent to you at Address 1.

Basically, you can’t pick up your recorded delivery letter, but you can authorise someone else to go and get it.

Brilliant.

Romanian post offices are one of the last bastions of pure, old fashioned state-run incompetence and indifference. But… if you have a burning desire to find out what life was really like in Romania before 1989 (complete with long, slow moving queues), then get to a post office as quickly as possible: the whiff of privatisation is in the air.

Tagged as: Bucharest, Post Office Bucharest, Posta Romana, Posta Vitan, Romtelecom