Having been sending off for all sorts of official documentation from the UK recently (as you do), I am interested in what these organisations mean when they say that an item has been dispatched.
As far as the central registry office is concerned, it looks like “dispatched” means something like “passed onto a third party for processing and then processing”, judging by the lengths of time between the dispatch and arrival (up to a month), whether posted to an address in the UK or to me in France. When the recipient in the UK posted her copies onto me, they took 2 days, so I don’t think the delay is with the post as such.
A month ago, when I sent off for my criminal records certificate, I took the option of international tracked and signed delivery to see if that made a difference. It took 2 weeks to get here after it was “dispatched”. However, Royal Mail’s tracking service still says that they are yet to received the item from the sender. So that wasn’t awfully useful as verification.
I know that a certain not-to-be-named large company says that things have been dispatched when they’ve left the relevant department and gone to the mailroom, where they wait for a certain number of similar items to arrived before finally sending them off.
Does anyone else have this experience? I can’t believe I’m the only one 