Someone, somewhere is expecting from you something which is never going to arrive. Why? Because you never sent it, that's why. They must never know this.

The perfect excuse of 1912 went something like this: 'I really can't understand why you haven't received it yet. I myself took it to the White Star line's freight depot and was assured that it was being sent express cargo on the SS Titanic.'

Seventy years later, newsworthy events still provide watertight alibis. Perhaps you gave it to a friend to post who said: I'll pop it in the box on my way back from the Iraqi embassy.' Or maybe an over-vigilant Post Office worker didn't like the look of the package and immersed it in a bucket of water until the Bomb Squad could put sandbags round it and detonate it. Every day the newspapers report fires, explosions, and crashes which could account for the loss of any number of things you have never sent off.

Statistically the odds are heavily against a letter or parcel being 'lost in the post' and even more loaded against you being believed if anything really did disappear in this way.

However, it's amazing how often wrongly addressed letters never reach their destinations, as is demonstrated by the following conversation:

'You should have had it by now. It went off, let me see now, must have been a week ago.'

'Well I never received it.'

'Let me check your address. Number 23 Eslington Terrace...'

'No! It's Number 33.'

'Well then, that explains everything.'

Another possibility is that, as a precaution against loss, you marked your own name and address on the back so distinctly that a sorter mistook the sender for the addressee and delivered it back to you . . . the day after you left home for three weeks' holiday.

Failure to meet promised delivery dates The usual reasons advanced by our imaginative captains of industry are: Christmas, staff shortages, a strike at the component factory, a fire at the works, a hold-up at the docks, the annual holidays, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and sickness.

The latest, recorded by Keith Waterhouse in the Daily Mirror, goes like this: 'We regret the delay in expediting your esteemed order. Due to redundancies in our packing department we are at present short of staff.'

An excuse more likely to win sympathy from the put-upon customer would go something like this:

'Our sales manager Ron Osborne has been kidnapped by left-wing guerillas in the Argentine. From what you have told me, your order must have been in Ron's order book at the time he was captured. Negotiations with the guerillas are at a very delicate stage, but we hope to have Ron - and his order book -out by Christmas.

'In the meantime, if we could have a deposit from you, it would help us meet the kidnappers' financial expectations. It means such a lot, this, to poor Ron's wife and three children.'

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