MAIL BY THE TON

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 75, 21 December 1929, Page 10

MAIL BY THE TON

POST OFFICE COPES WITH CHRISTMAS RUSH MARVEL OF ORGANISATION i (By E.A.A.) The Christmas rush has started at the Post Office. Every member of the staff, from the Chief-Postmaster himself down to the recently-joined telegraph messenger boy is working long hours at high pressure in order to get the mails away before Christmas. Rush work of this nature calls for most elaborate team work, and a degree of organisation rarely seen even in a huge store. At normal times some. 25 tons of parcels and letters are delivered in Wellington dally. During the week before Christmas no less than 45 tons of mall matter must be dealt with without delay every day. This refers, of course, only to local mail deliveries. But the Central Post Office has to deal with enormous quantities of Christmas mail in transit between one island and the other, not to mention the avalanche of outward letters written by residents in Wellington. Dumps of mail bags as big as a house seem to pile up in the sorting rooms in a matter of moments. Expert mail clerks are at work day and night sorting these malls. Accurate and highspeed pigeon-holing of letters cannot be acquired at short notice. For this reason it is virtually Impossible, in spite of the rush, to take on extra hands in the sorting department. An effort to do so indeed would lead to delay rather than speed. Quick’s the Action. The burden of getting the mails sorted thus rests on the shoulders of the normal staff. Instead of the usual 7-hour day’s work, it is necessary, during Christmas week, for them to work 12 or 14 hours. Overtime, of course, is paid. The work has, of course, to be done at top pressure. Whereas in the normal way a sorter handles some 500 letters in fifteen minutes, at this time of the year, by going at full speed, the time is cut down to 11 or 12 minutes. The sorting room is a bewildering medley of organised activity. Automatic letter stampers are whizzing through 800 letters a minute, busily defacing postage stamps. More bulky letters are being viciously smacked by men with long handled stamps with the speed of a pneumatic riveter. Mails pile up in bags for every corner of New Zealand and the world. Sorters with the manipulative dexterity of trained conjurors fling letters, unconcernedly, but accurately, into numerous sacks strung up on iron frameworks; other shoot them into pigeon holes for local delivery. In one corner the Sydney Christmas mails for the Maunganui were being sorted out into bags for every postal division in Sydney. There will be no delay at the other end. Close by mails for the Islands are being shot into their respective bags. It all looks simple, but an army of amateurs could wreck the system and clutter up the Post Office with an avalanche of mail.

Checking and Delivery.

Bags full of mail in transit are carefully checked and stacked for expeditious handling. Even the Nelson mail occupies a space as large as quite a respectable haystack. In another part of the room assistants are busy with overweight letters and unstamped correspondence, whilst forlorn amongst the Christmas rush a huge pile of “Hansards,” en route to subscribers, try to catch the Christmas rush spirit —and fail. Down the chutes from the letter boxes in the Post Office hall a never-ending cascade of new mail plies itself up in waiting baskets. Yet so efficient is the work, a letter for New Zealand posted in the foreign mail box would be detected instantly.

The postmen are perhaps more fortunate than their mail clerks in the sorting room. For at Christmas time they are given assistants to help carry the malls for delivery. Nearly 40 temporary postmen have been signed on in the Wellington district for Christmas week. Usually they go round with the regular postman. In spite of extra help, letters can only be delivered by working overtime. So great is the rush, and so prolific do people become in letter writing at this time of the year, a postman in some cases may .shoot nearly threequarters of a ton into the letter boxes of his round in one day. His day begins at half-past six. In addition to his rounds he has to sort out his letters Into proper delivery sequence. At rush times this may take him two or even three hours. Hence the tendency to late deliveries at Christmas week, and the rows of anxious householders tuned to pick up the most distant postman’s whistle. Indeed, without organisation deliveries would be later still. The mall for any given round that cannot be carried by the postman and his assistant is dropped from vans at central dumps. From these dumps the various postmen return for new loads for the letter boxes. No sooner is one bag emptied but the postman must go back to the dump for more all day they work—up to 12 or more hours on end.