MISSING LETTERS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 364, 27 October 1932, Page 7

MISSING LETTERS

freak deliveries DEFAULTER WHO .FORGOT TO POST AND BURN EVIDENCE BETTER LATE THAN NEVER Although the great majority of letters and other articles dropped into the postal receiving boxes find their way expeditiously and uneventfully to the correct destination, departments in every country have had their experiences of "freak" deliveries. It is the 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 teve been "in the post" for ten years or more. Some years ago an old receiving box in a Melboume office was dismantled. Beneaijh it there was found a little pile of letters, dusty, covered with cobwebs, and nearly faded addresses. By some extraordinary chance these letters had slipped down a crack in the bottom of the box go small that it had escaped notice. The oldest letter had been there for more than ten years. By good for'tune 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 readdressed and triumphantly delivered. Postal officers declare that hy far the greatest number of delayed deliveries are due to the forgetfulness of persons entrusted with letters to post. The domestic consequences of the non-delivery of invitations and replies, it is declared, are often grave. Therefore many defaulters, instead of ppsting the letters, find it prudent unobtrusively to burn all evidence of their carelessness. Another fruitful cause of delay in Australia is the ommission of the name of the State from interstate addresses. There are, unfortunately main towns in three or more States of the 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 are often avoided in extraordinary cifcumstances. 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 'oi the name in Duhbo,- over 200 miles from Sydney, and by 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.