HANDLING LETTERS

Southland Times, Issue 25307, 10 June 1935, Page 4

HANDLING LETTERS

SORTERS’ QUICK ACTION. SOME MEMORY FEATS. When one posts a miscellaneous handful of letters for many destinations he is quite confident that those which should be despatched within an hour or less by train or steamer will invariably start on their way without delay. The fact that this always happens is due, in the first instance, to the sorters who combine quick thinking and action with a display of geographical knowledge surprising to the layman, until it is realized that these men are carefully selected and trained to do the same thing day after day. Those privileged to see behind the scenes at any of the principal post offices towards the end of the business day will be impressed by the piles of postal packets emptied from hampers and bags upon the main sorting table. In the rush hour, so many sorters stand round this table that each man has only just enough elbow-room for his work. Here is done the preliminary sorting to eliminate letters too large to go through the rapid-action automatic date-stamping machine. Once the date-stamp is impressed, the letters go in piles to the primary sorter, who stands facing large nests of pigeon-holes, each carrying the name of a town or district. Taking ■up a handful of letters, the sorter, with a quick turn of the wrist, distributes them unerringly into the right pigeonhole. He might have a hundred different pigeon-holes into which successive letters must be distributed. There is never a moment’s hesitation; in fact the rapidity of this work suggests that the sorter has 'no need to read any name on a pigeon-hole. It is actually a fact that many of these highly skilled officers could make the distribution accurately without the place labels. Private-boxes at the Wellington C.P.O. total 1670, and it is another well authenticated fact that, whether an address contains the post-office box number or not, the sorters always know when a letter should go to one of these boxes. As the piles in the pigeon-holes in-

crease, they are neatly tied into bundles to be dropped into the mail bags placed in clusters, labelled in large type with their ultimate destination. This description was taken at a rush time, but the work goes on steadily all day, for there is no end to the stream of postal packets coming into the office. The story is told of a temporary assistant who was employed in the busy season to clear postal boxes in one of the city areas. An official seeing the stranger doing this work remarked in a friendly way “How are you getting on with your job?” “Oh,” replied the temporary hand dolefully, “I have been trying to get this blanky box cleared for two days, and I haven’t emptied it yA!”