Air Mail - the new snail mail: A Rant

Apparently Australia Post has done well enough to pay its CEO squillions, while reducing the efficiency of services and increasing the cost of those increasingly inefficient services. What a business model - it says so much about the times in which we are living.

That CEO, Ahmed Fahour, has quit AP now - check out this fat golden handshake as you bemoan the increase in the price of a fucking stamp: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-25/ahmed-fahour-walks-away-from-australia-post-with-$10.8-million/8841226

One of the cost-saving measures touted as a possibility by Australia Post a few years ago was not, as you might expect, reducing the astronomical six figure salary of the CEO, but reducing the number of postal deliveries from one per weekday to 3 per week. Poor Australia Post was losing money hand over fist. Nobody writes letters any more (although everyone sends parcels, it seems, and I'm quite certain that is a very very lucrative part of Australia Post's business.)

The three-deliveries-a-week thing, thankfully, did not happen here, and now that Mr Fahour has taken his money and ridden off into the sunset, the new Australia Post CEO, Christine Holgate, will take home a considerably smaller six-figure salary, saving Australia Post several million dollars per year. That is a Good Thing.

BUT (there's always a 'BUT', isn't there?)

Across the ditch, our Kiwi cousins have not been so lucky. NZ Post delivers thrice weekly. What that means, for anybody who posts anything from Oz, is that delivery times have slowed. A lot. I'm not altogether sure of the finer details, because really, you'd think it'd only mean a one-day delay, wouldn't you? (No delivery on Tuesday? No problem - deliver on Wednesday instead.) Instead, it appears to have added more than a week to the delivery time. Yes, I'm serious.

Once upon a time, posting something via Airmail - which used to be the speedy option - took just a few days to get from Canberra to Christchurch - add a day, perhaps even two if you're posting from Mallacoota, because Mallacoota mail takes a day or so to get to Melbourne before it can fly to NZ.

This year, my Dad's birthday card arrived late. I made sure I posted his Fathers Day card earlier than usual - it still arrived late. I posted another card  MORE THAN TWO WEEKS before a special event AND IT WAS FUCKING LATE!

It would appear that our postal non-services would like us to pay extra for "EXPRESS AIRMAIL", adding several dollars to the already high cost of airmail. It's true - your letter/parcel to NZ can now fly cattle class, just like you, or you can pay through the nose for it to fly (probably on the same flight) the equivalent of First Class. Unless its getting a bed to sleep in and complimentary in-flight champagne, they can shove that up their inefficient bums!

So - I posted a SMALL STANDARD item AIRMAIL WITH TRACKING to my Dad on 14 November.  It weighed about 320gms, went in an A3 sized tough-bag and cost me $17.76 to post. I've been tracking it - you bet I have - to see why it takes so bloody long.

So..... looks like it's been cooling its heels in Auckland since Monday morning after being cleared through Customs. And now it's Thursday.

Why, NZ Post?

I know that Thursday is not a delivery day, but does every single person involved in the postal process only work on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as well? Even if that were the case, why wasn't my item happily whizzing from Auckland to Chch on Monday, which IS an NZ Post day? Or even Wednesday, which is also a delivery day? Why is it still in Auckland on Thursday?

In Chch, a private document delivery service has sprung up to fill in the gaps left by NZ Post. We Australia Post customers, however, are stuck with AusPost and NZ Post's abysmal non-service. I'm angry.

I'm thinking of getting a carrier pigeon. Or learning to swim. It'd probably be quicker.

UPDATE: Dad texted to say a courier had delivered his article around the middle of the day on 23 November. Something in the "tracking" was evidently awry, with no notifications between Auckland and Christchurch. So - 9 days to travel airmail from Mallacoota to Christchurch. This article arrived more quickly than cards I have posted - does this mean parcel post is taken more seriously/quickly? (for all values of 'quickly' equal to "not very quickly" or "pretty slowly, actually, but it's all relative"?) You're still not off the hook, Aus- and NZ Post.

Letter-writing - rediscovering simple joy

When I was a recently-transplanted Pom, back in the mid-1960s, one of the most exciting things ever was the arrival of a letter or a card all the way from England, with Nana or Grandad’s handwriting on the envelope.

As a teenager I had an English penfriend. For years we sent each other monstrous epistles on thin, lightweight airmail paper, sharing our thoughts, our joys and woes and our deepest secrets. My brother Mick and I did the same, packing enormous wads of paper into small envelopes that bulged mightily with closely-written pages and pages of news and secrets. The year that I lived in Japan, the post was a lifeline to home.

The thrill of an envelope hand-addressed to me has stayed with me all my life.

And then came email. How immediate! How exciting! I,fickle creature that I am, and most of my fickle generation, abandoned letter-writing in favour of emails, online chat, sms texts and the biggest letter-writing killer of all – social networking sites. Long, newsy letters to individuals, and the creation of a shared ‘history for two’ have given way to short, pithy status updates or 140-character tweets to an entire network of friends and acquaintances. Intimacy has been sacrificed on the altar of immediacy. It’s sad.

Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE the fact that I can stay in contact with so many people so easily. But staying in touch via a series of generic and impersonal bytes of life isn't the same as the written equivalent of a whispered message in the ear of a friend, meant for them and them alone. Besides, I miss the thrill of seeing my name handwritten on an envelope.

Think about it – when someone writes you a letter, it means that they care enough about you to write something that is just for you; to fold it and address it, attach a stamp to it and take it to a mailing point - each action a ritual of friendship that they have considered worth spending time on. Think for one second about how very special that is!

Every day I put hundreds of postal articles into hundreds of mailboxes. Tragically, the small handwritten envelope is almost extinct. The only things that travel through the post these days (apart from the thousands of parcels - online shopping booty that is killing the retail industry in the same way that online communication is killing letter-writing) are bills, advertising bumf and super-aggressive Readers Digest marketing ‘letters’ masquerading as sweepstake entries. Those are the things keeping the postal system alive – and they suck!

The Readers Digest 'mail' that has cluttered up my letterbox over the last month or so. They must spend a fortune on postage - no wonder their merchandise is so expensive! I'm saving up all my letters, and when I have enough to fill a small box - won't be long now - I will send them back with a nice letter.

 

Here's something to think about:

If everyone in Australia wrote just ONE personal letter a fortnight, the volume of mail would increase a hundredfold, and the joy quotient a thousandfold.

I read Jane Austen’s Lady Susan a while ago, and the epistolary style of the novel made me nostalgic for the shared world of letters between friends. I was inspired to take up letter-writing again, after many years of thumping away at a keyboard, embroiled in e-comms. Oh, what a pleasure it was, constructing sentences in my head and committing them to paper without the middleman of a keyboard with a delete button! But it was nothing compared to the pleasure when, yesterday, during the execution of my mail-sorting duties, I came across a letter addressed to me in my friend Anna’s hand. I collected it from my PO Box at the end of my shift and, quivering, carried it home to read. It made my day – my week, in fact.
 

No email, no pithy text or witty tweet can compare to tucking into the juicy words of a real, hand-written letter that is just for you. I am so glad I rediscovered that joy, and I am so so sorry knowing that so many youngsters will probably never know that joy for themselves.
 

Write a letter to someone today – go on!