It is easy to imagine the frustration and anger that erupted from hundreds of Dunedin people when they discovered a postbox in a central city location had gone undelivered for the entire month of February.
No fewer than 1700 undelivered items built up - that number sounds like a lot, but imagine how much quicker those boxes would have got clogged if this was 30 years ago, when ‘‘snail mail’’ ruled and email was a foreign concept.
Case studies quickly emerged. The man who had posted 11 cheques for payments to different charities and sounded the alarm when he had not got
any receipts back; the woman whose son had sent an application for a scholarship; the businessman who would not be getting paid on time because invoices had been held up.
Doubtless, there were plenty of other cases of relatively urgent mail that had gone nowhere for a month.
More details will clearly emerge. Has a reasonable chink in New Zealand Post’s armour been exposed? Or, as a spokesman maintained, was this genuinely an ‘‘isolated incident’’?
Sending mail through the post has become something of an archaic process when you consider the sheer volume of emails, texts and direct messages that now clog the online space.
But it’s still a vital tool for a lot of people. And those people continue to put bills and wedding invitations and, yes, even personal letters through these boxes on street corners with the absolute, unshakeable belief they will get to their respective destinations.
This sort of event will plant a seed of doubt in many minds.
It is funny - in a way; try getting a laugh out of the people whose mail lay dormant for a month - to think how far postal delivery has come over the past century and a bit.
The Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in the United States has a delightful story about the installation of an innovative mail scheme in 1897 beneath, to quote Bruce Springsteen, the streets of Philadelphia.
Frustrated by how long it was taking for posties to move mail around the city in the middle of a commercial boom, US Postmaster-general John Wanamaker called for the construction of a wide-ranging pneumatic tube system, and whoosh, the letters started flying.
All these years later, down this end of the world, similar letters are lying, lost and lonely, in a box. There’s some sort of message about progress there.
AND ANOTHER THING
To use one of the sport’s own terms, cricket in New Zealand is in real danger of being dismissed by hitting its own wickets. Or is it about to bowl a beamer?
It could be considered unfortunate timing to be highlighting concerns at a point when the Black Caps are justly celebrating a wonderful 2-0 test series win over the touring Indians. But a closer look reveals some serious issues for the summer game.
Already plummeting in popularity at school and grassroots levels, cricket is set for a further hit following major changes to the way it is consumed at the top level.
Abandoning Sky Television for online-only Spark Sport will automatically lead to a reduced audience for international cricket in future summers, and falling off Radio Sport adds to that. Fewer people watching or listening to top-class cricket translates to fewer wanting to play or coach cricket.
Add in the prohibitive cost of attending one-day international and twenty20 games, and you get a picture of a sport putting obstacles in front of its fans, when it should be doing everything possible to cherish them.