LETTERS THAT GO ASTRAY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21296, 24 September 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

LETTERS THAT GO ASTRAY

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER _____ s IN THE POST FOR TEN YEARS Although the great majority of letters and other articles dropped into the postal receiving boxes find their way- expeditiously and uneventfully to their correct destination, departments in every country have had experiences of " freak " deliveries. It is a .tradition of all postal departments that, no effort should be abandoned until all means of tracing the addressee have been exhausted. This tradition has been applied even to letters which have been " in the post " for 10 years or more. Some years ago an old receiving box in a Melbourne office was dismantled. Beneath it there was found a little pile of letters, dust v. covered with cobwebs, and with nearly faded addresses. By some extraordinary chance these letters had slipped down a crack in the bottom of the box so small that it had always escaped notice. The oldest letter had been there for more than 10 years. By good fortune the person to whom it was addressed had not died in the meantime, and. after he had been traced from suburb to suburb, the letter was re-addressed "and triumphantly delivered. f Postal officers declare thai by far the greatest number of delayed deliveries are due to the forgetfulness of persons entrusted with letters to post. J.he domestic consequences of the non delivery of invitations and replies, it is declared, are often grave. Therefore many defaulters, instead of posting the letters, find it prudent unobtrusively to burn nil evidence of their carelessness Another fruitful cause of delay in Australia is the omission of the name, of the state from interstate addresses. There are. unfortunately, many towns in three or more states of tlie same name, and several weeks are often lost in delivering, by process of elimination, a letter insufficiently addressed to one of three towns. On the other hand, delayed deliveries nre often avoided in extraordinary circumstances. At the Sydney Post Office recently the attention of a sorter was caught , by an unusual name to which a letter was addressed to a street in Sydney. By chance he knew that the owner of the name lived in a street of the same name in Dubbo, over 200 miles from Sydney, and bv readdressing the. letter he forwarded it without delay. Except for this coincidence, delivery probably would have been impossible, and the letter would have been returned to the sender or transferred to the dead-letter office.