A mechanic has shared footage from inside a filthy Royal Mail van, and it is the sort of clip that makes you feel truly sorry for whoever has to actually sit in the thing every morning.
The van in question is a red Vauxhall Combo in the familiar Royal Mail livery.
By the time the camera starts rolling, the entire driver’s side door card has been removed and is sitting on the passenger seat like it has been invited along for the ride.
The window winder, which on a Combo of this age is the manual sort, is lying on the floor. The passenger seat is also home to a couple of empty Red Bull cans, and the footwells are buried under a pile of rubbish, paperwork and elastic bands.
We cannot say for certain whether the mechanic in the clip works directly for Royal Mail or for an outside garage. Plenty of fleet work gets contracted out, and a fair number of Royal Mail vans on UK roads pass through third party workshops.
Either way, what they have opened up is not pretty.
Inside The Filthy Royal Mail Van
The walkaround starts at the passenger door. The mechanic swings it open and there, propped up on the passenger seat alongside a couple of empty Red Bull cans, is the entire driver’s side door card.
He reaches in, lifts it out, and walks it round to the back of the van to get it out of the way before he can start working.
With the door card relocated, the camera pans across to the driver’s side, and that is where things really stop looking normal.
The actual door has been stripped back to bare red metal, exposing the wiring, the latch and the inner workings of the window mechanism.
The driver’s side window winder then comes off in the mechanics hand as he tries to use it.
If you have ever wondered what a Combo looks like with its trousers down, now you know.
Red Bull Cans, Elastic Bands And A Mountain Of Paperwork
The passenger footwell is where it really starts to get grim.
There are crumpled receipts, and torn envelopes in various states of decay.
There are scraps of card, a roll of red and white stickers (collection stickers, at a guess), and the standard beige Royal Mail elastic bands scattered across the floor in the sort of quantity that suggests they have been accumulating for months rather than days.
A Glimpse At The Door Mechanism
Towards the end of the clip, the mechanic is shown working the internal locking mechanism to see if it still operates.
Because it is completely detached from the door, it just kind of wobbles mid-air as he tests it, dangling on its cables against the bare red metal of the panel.
The Wider Point
Posties spend a long time in their vans.
Things get dropped, things get spilled, wrappers pile up. But there is a difference between a lived in van and a van that looks like it has been used as a skip, and the one in this footage is closer to the second.
It also adds another small entry to a fairly long list of recent Royal Mail stories we have covered, from runaway vans rolling down hills in Salford to sickness rates sitting near triple the national average.
You can watch the footage in full below.
