A message to those who rush to social media to complain: Get a life | David Penberthy

When a postie waited just 90 seconds for a business owner after ringing the bell, the man slammed him on social media. Others piled on. David Penberthy has a message.

One of the key reasons airlines such as Qantas struggle to address negative publicity is the modern capacity for being vocally outraged about poor service in real time.

A little more than 10 years ago, if you had some drama with your flight, or your bags went missing, you simply had to suck it up. By the time you had resolved the problem, the anger would have passed.

Aside from grumbling to your friends you were unlikely to make a public issue of it by ringing a radio station, or writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, or creating a website devoted to outlining the drama you had endured.

These days through the advent of social media people are able to vent their spleens in real time about any shortcoming be it significant or trifling. It is getting to the point where the most minor of things can be billed as a major scandal or grave injustice in the minds of those who feel let down. The two vehicles people use to chronicle their anger are the mobile phone camera and their preferred social media platform to upload the offending material.

There was a great example of that this week out of Newcastle, where a businessman who was waiting for Australia Post to deliver a parcel became enraged over what he saw as poor service from a postie.

The postman had arrived at the business to deliver a package but waited only 90 seconds before heading off to leave the parcel back at the local post office. The bloke who owned the business was so angered by this that he downloaded and edited CCTV footage of the postie, making no effort to obscure his face, and then wrote an indignant post on Facebook for all the world to see.

“This is apparently Australia Post’s idea of attempting to deliver a registered post item,” the customer wrote. “I was in my office with a client at the time, with a big ‘open’ sign in the window.”

The hapless postie was blasted for trying to do his job. Picture: Facebook.

The post received a massive response from others on Facebook and became a national story on news.com and on television stations in the eastern states.

Comments posted on Facebook variously described the postie as lazy and slack, and said the businessman should lodge a formal complaint to Australia Post to have him disciplined.

I see the whole thing differently and would offer three words to the businessman and all the people who were cheering him on. Get a life.

The first point to consider here is to wonder what the average postie gets paid. I can’t imagine there’s too many posties who have ended up acquiring harbourside properties on account of a lifetime spent dodging dogs and delivering parcels in the rain.

The second is to wonder whether some isolated act of marginal slackness really tells a greater truth about Australia Post and its commitment to service.

I know my postie well mainly due to this household’s enthusiasm for online shopping and he’s a lovely bloke. A few times he has disappeared when attempting to make a delivery because I have been slow getting to the door, but the impact of that means nothing more arduous than a trip to the local post office, less than five minutes drive away, next to a supermarket which I habitually frequent.

The bigger point goes to the loss of perspective. When you stop and think about it in the context of the famine in Yemen, the civil war in the Congo and the invasion of Ukraine, it is kind of hilarious there’s some bloke in Newcastle who’s so upset by the belated receipt of a frigging parcel that he will put his own name to a Facebook post about his ordeal.

This kind of anti-social hectoring on social media matters less for a corporatised entity such as Australia Post than it does for small businesses that now all operate in a world where Google reviews weaponise the whingers who have been mortally offended by some perceived minor failing.

The postie retrieves the post from the back of their bike before sitting back down. Picture: Facebook.

How many restaurants or hotels or tradies have had their livelihoods jeopardised by people who most of us would regard as high-maintenance pains in the bum? I’m in the middle of planning a major overseas holiday, the first I have ever done with all of my kids, and have spent much of the past fortnight reading sites such as TripAdvisor and booking.com.

The reviews section on these websites seems of limited value as it operates largely as a hangout for a particularly disagreeable brand of entitled whiner, a bit like the characters in the superb drama The White Lotus, whose first-world problems find perfect voice online.

Part of our holiday will be in a tropical locale and one hotel I was looking at booking had several complaints about how the hotel was humid and had a lot of cockroaches. That’s one of the things you get in the tropics I guess, humidity and cockroaches, but in the eyes of these reviewers it was less a natural phenomenon than grounds for the immediate closure of an affordable and pleasant family-run B&B on the Yucatán Peninsula.

The psychology of all this is a bit like toilet-roll hoarding. It’s about a desire for control, a weird and fruitless yearning for life to go according to plan.

People power is a good thing in principle. But in the same way that a downside of democracy is that it empowers the NIMBY, the digital age has also emboldened the entitled, to the point where they will seek to rob a person of their job or a business of its reputation, simply because life doesn’t always go according to plan.