As far as I know, the postal service has never made an inexplicable decision not to deliver any correctly addressed letter or parcel of mine and then followed it up with an incomprehensible error message.
There’s not much in my actual mailbox these days — some begging letters from charities and other junk mail, bank statements I haven’t got around to stopping and the occasional parcel or card.
The cheque will not be in the mail any more (if it ever was), but there is also less likelihood of discovering unwelcome bills now many of us pay regular accounts online.
I cannot remember the last time I received a chatty letter from someone, but then I haven’t sent one in a while either.
An unread email in your inbox cannot compete with the excitement of discovering an engaging letter, or the thrill of re-reading it later.
It is hard to imagine anyone trawling through their years of emails in later life to find some gems the way I can return to my motley collection of family letters, some dating back to the time of my mother’s birth in the 1920s.
A few letters home from my father’s time serving in the Pacific in World War 2 have survived.
His letters look like something written in code, due to his lifelong habit of putting his dots on i’s and crosses on t’s on following words rather than the words where those letters occurred.
He would detest my potty mouth because he hated even a stray "damn" or "hell".
His idea of an insult was calling someone a "dopey stinker", a "pest to try the tolerance of the most patient people, yet he went unscathed till natural causes caught up with him".
I was fascinated to read he had received a letter, "all twitters, from an old flame advising of her marriage taking place. She supposed I’d evince an interest in the bridal regalia so gave a full description of the less intimate articles of dress, bouquets etc, bridesmaids, cake, reception, ceremony — in short everything, as well as a few raptures of the groom!".
Who knew there were any old flames?
In my collection, there are also some of the letters I wrote to my late mother-in-law.
I laughed out loud at the inclusion of a newspaper clipping featuring one of my sub-editor husband’s headlines on a brief story about a woman who gave birth to quadruplets after fertility treatment, when it had been expected she would conceive twins. It said: "Fecund, fird, forf?"
While this nostalgia is distracting me from my email woes, how many of us immersed in online activity pause to realise many people still rely on mail for connection with others, along with some businesses?
It is a grim time for them because postal charges increased substantially this month, prompted by the continuing decline in mail volume and the end of three years’ support from the government to cover expected losses from that.
Big job cuts are expected at NZ Post too.
I am with those 13 groups wanting big changes to the government’s deed of understanding with NZ Post, due to be reviewed by the end of June next year. They point out stipulating access points and delivery days are irrelevant if the price is too high for anyone to use the service.
While the cost of delivering a standard letter is universal no matter where you live, it bugs me that if you buy one of NZ Post’s pre-paid parcel bags and take it to a postal counter to send to a rural delivery (RD) address, you will be charged an extra $5.50 (up this month from $4.80).
There is no mention of that extra charge on the bag and, contrary to what NZ Post believes, the information is not displayed on walls at every outlet selling such bags.
Since some RD addresses would not be more remote than my semi-rural setting, which does not attract the extra charge, this seems an arbitrary and unfair cost.
If you bought the bag, filled it at home and popped it in a postbox yourself, oblivious of the RD charge, NZ Post tells me the parcel may be deemed short paid, returned to sender or delivered as addressed, at its discretion. It did not answer my question about how such discretion was applied.
There is no easy solution to the challenges faced by postal services.
But, since NZ Post is a state-owned enterprise and there will continue to be a need for a universal postal service, the Government cannot let it decline to the point where it is too expensive or inefficient to be useful to those who need it most.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
