Upper Moutere rural delivery owner-driver Garry Pullen, has been servicing rural customers for four years. He describes the job as less stressful that the Trade Union secretary he once was, but emphasised the old cliché - he is becoming wearier of dogs more than anything else.
"Delivering parcels, dropping off boxes of wine and you have a Rottweiler there, foaming at the mouth type of thing. I've never been bitten, but at the same time I don't put myself in a situation where I'm going to be. I'm a postie - not a dog's dinner!"
It takes Garry a daily average of five hours to travel 120kms delivering to 560 customers. Take into account that the New Zealand average household has 4.3 occupants, and add business names. "Because there are a large number of people that work from home, and then the various orchards, you have to remember 3,000 odd names."
More people are working from home and one of his biggest difficulties is not being made aware when a new business is opened. "You get a chequebook for such and such a place and you just don't know where they are - being a chequebook it just gets sent straight back," Garry said.
At the mention of 'advertising circulars', Garry exhorts a sharp expletive, citing a monthly survey in 1999 which saw him deliver 64,000 pieces of material, he does on average four pieces to each mailbox. "The strange thing about it is you have people that hate them, and then people that just absolutely love them, and then people in between that only want the newsy ones. There are ways of controlling it but then it makes it difficult for me, for me no junk mail is no junk mail," he explained.
Even after four years however, there are still people behind the mailboxes he hasn't met, and yet the meeting the people is the best thing. "I am the type of person that is extremely discreet, gossip is not my scene. I'm a person that questions other people too when they want to know where somebody else is. To me, the person behind the mailbox is a customer, and this information is privileged only to me and should not be bandied about."
New Zealand Rural Post began in 1905 and today has 573 rural delivery owner-drivers that drive an average 93,207 kms daily servicing 178,672 customers who are delivered more than 135 million articles per annum.
The Regional Contracts manager for Rural Post is Christchurch based Dave Hunter, and he described the main problem for his team, is people using the wrong sized mailboxes. "Generally in the rural deliveries, people get more mail than urban people do, and for us to be able to deliver mail we need to have a regulation sized mailbox, there are two different types, a rural mailbox has a red flag on it. A lot of people don't realise that and put up an ordinary urban one which is very difficult for our contractors to deliver into."
And while not wanting to inhibit creative types who place their wondrous homebuilt pride and joy at the gate, "unfortunately some are absolutely useless to put the mail in," he added dryly. "Owner drivers are not surposed to leave their vehicle when they deliver their mail. Mail should be delivered wherever possible from the driver side of their vehicle."
