Paper chase worth $36,000

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32838, 11 February 1972, Page 1

Paper chase worth $36,000

The Post Office has saved itself about $36,000 by staging one of the biggest unplanned paper chases seen in Chrischurch.

Forty thousand toll call tickets were lost from the back of a Post Office van in Moorhouse Avenue on Wed- 1 nesdav afternoon. In spite of a howling southerly and the heavy flow of ; traffic on the avenue. Post Office staff, helped by some school pupils, managed to retrieve nearly all of them. Since Wednesday the staff have been painstakingly drying and sorting out the tickets and trying to determine to which accounts they should be’’charged. The Chief Postmaster (Mr

M. T. Reedy) said yesterday that the van was carrying about 300,000 toll tickets from the Chief Post Office to the zone telephone accounts section in Moorhouse Avenue for charging to subscribers’ accounts.

The load of cartons containing the tickets moved and one carton struck the door handle. The door flew open and four cartons containing 60,000 tickets dropped to the roadway, at the intersection of Durham Street Two cartons burst on impact and the tickets flew like confetti. The other two remained partly intact A team of eight Post Office employees went to the scene immediately to retrieve as many tickets as possible. Mr Reedy ordered them to ignore any tickets that might involve them taking personal nsks to recover. “We believe we recovered the vast majority and will know how many are missing after drying, sorting and repacking,’’ he said. Many tickets were mutilated by vehicles running over them but those that are still legible will be charged to subscribers’ accounts. Included in the tickets were those for international telephone calls made during the Christmas period. The Post Office has duplicates of these at the overseas terminal in Auckland.

Mr Reedy said he was very grateful to several pupils of Hagley High School who helped to gather up the tickets, which flew into

many streets off Moorhouse Avenue. Some were recovered in Colombo Street.

Two Post Office employees made a further extensive search for tickets yesterday morning and found a few. Some telegram charging dockets were also lost and because of the lightness of the paper were too badly mutilated to be read.

“We will not be able to debit these,” said Mr Reedy. Such a thing has never happened before, and the Post Office is taking special precautions to ensure that it does not happen again. The photograph shows Mrs G. Senior sorting out some of the wet cards on a sheet of blotting paper.