Dear Sir, In Reply to Yours of the...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 262, 30 June 1944, Page 16

Dear Sir, In Reply to Yours of the...

HIS morning, between morn-ing-tea and lunch, you dictated a couple of dozen letters to your typist who, between rows of purl and plain, typed half of them, went to lunch, typed the other half and had them ready for you to sign by about three o'clock. It was about four o’clock when you got back to your office-that fellow: Burns talked so long-so by the time you had signed the lettérs and your typist had put them into window envelopes, stuck down the flaps and put on the stamps, your typist had only just enough time to put on her street-going lipstick, hair-bow, hat, etc., snatch up the bundle of letters and fly clicket-clicket down the stairs and along to the post office. Most of\the other junior typists and office boys in the city are posting, too; so in 10 minutes around five o’clock you can see 10,000 letters go into the apertures at the Chief Post Office, Auckland. You’ve written your letter, you’ve dropped it through the aperture; you

don’t need to give it another thoughtit will be delivered by a heavily-laden post-girl about 9 o'clock to-morrow morning. But if that. letter is going to a suburb it has to be handled nine times during the night and early morning before it is dropped into the box at your gate. And wherever it is going it has to be handied at least six times-you will be peacefully sleeping while it is being hustled from pigeon-hole to pigeon-hole. From the street apertures at the C.P.O. the letters do the first stage of the journey in snappy time: 80 seconds on a moving belt of canvas till they come avalanching down a chute on to one of the longest tables I have seen outside a sheep station bunk-house. From ‘5 to 7 p.m. the letters pile up a foot to two feet deep on this table, Fifteen girls are facing-up. At last I have found out what the expression means. I thought it had something to do with courage or danger; but no: facing-up is bundling the letters together, addresses upwards, stamps to the top, ready for the date-stamping machines. There are two of these, each attended by a man. The letters are stack the power is turned on, and those greedy rollers swallow the letters with a rattle at the rate of 800 a minute. You can scarcely call it one-by-one at this rate; and yet they actually go through one at a time-but I wouldn't like to have to move so slippy to keep ahead of the fellow behind. | No Orchids for Flimsies Date-stamping in wartime is no fun, the men say. The reason is that there are too many flimsies-letters with save-paper-stickers instead of envelopes; envelopes with one label stuck on top of another for a second, a third or even a fourth use; poor quality paper which crumples and wilts before the greedy rollers of the machine have so much as grabbed it once. So every few seconds there is a jam session; but if you listen carefully you won’t’ describe the comments you hear as music, jazz, swing, or jive. The machines make an automatic count, and they put through from 86,000, to 120,000 letters a day, 20 per cent of these inevitably being those foul little flimsies that can only be described .as.etc., etc. ... I saw at least a dozen different shapes and sizes of envelopes which had to be sorted into groups for the machines; continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) besides the foolscap, photographic, and bigger envelopes which had to be stamped by hand with the old country post office familiar de-da thump of the stamper from ink pad to envelope, de-da, de-da, de-da, at an eye-popping rate. Staggered Hours, Erratic Meals The huge mail room is warm, not draughty. But what comfort other than warmth can you have if you stand in the same place for hours and hours, sorting, sorting, sorting? Even when you're used to it, they told me, the constant shuffle with the left thumb (which wears a rubber thimble, practically unprocurable now), the constant flick with the right wrist, the right elbow, the right shoulder into a low, a level or a’ high pigeon-hole, makes you tired, makes you muscle-bound, makes your back ache. The 19 girls and 10 men (with an additional five men for rush hours) in this shift work to-day from 1 to 10 p.m. with a tea hour from 4 to 5, a cup of tea, speedily, at 7 o’clock. Tomorrow they begin at 7 a.m. and finish at 1 p.m.; and beginning again the next day at 1 p.m. They say they like this arrangement, because it gives them a consecutive afternoon and morning free, Many of them are married and have one child or two. But they live with their mothers, and so can leave the children to do a war job. By the time they have done their share of the housework and the children’s washing and mending there is not much time for idleness, they say, one of them adding, "but of course we all find our own fun, you know; it’s no good being drudges." I asked one girl how she liked the staggered hours. "Staggered?" she said. "I work from 8 to 6 with two hours off from 12 till 2. Do you call that staggered?" "No," I said. "Sorry. I’m the one who’s staggered." "Our meal hours are rather erratic," one of the men said, mildly. "For instance, to-morrow morning most of us will have to have our breakfasts before 6 o'clock to be here by 7. Then we have a cup of tea after 9 and nothing more till we go home after 1 o'clock. The next day we'll have lunch at 12 and be here at 1 o’clock. The tea break is from 4 till 5, cup of tea at 7 and nothing more till we get home at 11 o’clock or so." There is a properly fitted meal room and there are also wash rooms (hot and cold showers) and an enviably comfortable lounge for those with a two-hour break to. fill in. But even with these amenities I find "rather erratic" a mild description for the meal hours of the people on the various shifts. "Of course," said qa man sorting a bunch of letters from a trading firm, "if the public would only do progressive posting through the day instead of leaving it all till 5 p.m. we’d be able to take a later tea hour and would arrive home at 11 o’clock a bit less empty than we do these nights. The typists are too busy knitting and doing crossword puzzles and the office boys leave all the stamp-licking to do at once, it seems." Buffalo-Bill-Day "What is the worst day of the week?" I asked. "Friday, for city mail. Monday for country mail," the supervisor said, "And the 20th is the worst day of the month, bill day." I assured him that many Listener readers would agree with him there. All the sorters chorused with a (continued on next page)

WHILE OTHERS SLEEP {continued from previous page) groan, but did not pause in their hands flipping movements. The facers-up flapped louder on the facing-up table and sighed "Bill day, oh, the 20th." I asked for a nice, short, succinct definition of Bill Day; but they all held their mouths tightly shut, especially the superintendent. "Well, what about Christmas?" I asked. Oh Christmas, they all wailed "You think there’s a lot of mail flood: ing on to that table now — well, you just haven’t seen anything. For 10 days before Christmas we worked 13 hours a day every day, and after that we knew what it was to be tired." It was almost a chorus. They had worked from 8 a.m. till 9 p.m. and the next shift had worked from 9 p.m. till 8 a.m. And on Christmas Eve last year the post office handled more mail (local postings) than at any other time in his experience of 38 years, the superintendent said. In these normal times there is a break of two "hours between 10 p.m. when this shift finishes and midnight when the next (midnight to 7 a.m.) comes in. Only men work on the midnight to 7 am. shift-dealing with the very heavy mails, including newspapers, going out on the early morning trains. Some Letters Are Dead I was appalled by the letter avalanche on the facing-up table; but there Were more daunting things in other depart-ments-the zoo, for instance. Here was a beautiful big envelope labelled O.H.M.S. in huge and clear black letters: but the rest of its foot square surface was clean, clear, unmarred by pen or pencil-communication officially presumed dead. Here were puzzle pictures — stamps artistically placed in a heart-shaped pattern, with the address unreadable; a bright green envelope with an address, once written in the top left-hand corner where the stamping marks had obscured it; many more letters gone dead, to any unspecified Mr. Smith, Miss Brown, for a clever post girl to find in some place called OU., PN., DN., WGTN., or CHCH. "We do send them on," said the superintendent, "but all letters addressed to abbreviations should rightly go to the Dead Letter Office. And also we don’t send to a poste restante address indefin-itely-after three. months they have to find a house." "Even in Auckland?" j "Yes. Even in Auckland. .Even in Wellington!" \ Groans-And Geography _. I asked the sorters if the public could do anything to help their work: from the chorus of immediate replies I sorted the following: "If only they’d post early in the day!" "If only they’d write the TOWN in capitals!" "If only they’d put the address in the right place!" (In left lower quarter ef envelope face). "If only they’d spell everything and not use initials!" "If only they wouldn’t use window envelopes with thick windows!" "If only they’d buy a new typewriter ribbon!" "If only they’d put the stamps at the top where they can be machinedated!" "If only they’d use their private box numbers!" "Oh, they’re not so bad, really," said a fat man, when the chorus was silent. "We grumble, but we get through it all right. There’s lots with worse jobs." (continued on next page)

---LE= = ----- (continued from previous page) "Yes, at least you’re learning something in this job-geography and so on, I'd certainly rather have it than a whole lot of war jobs." This was a woman who had volunteered for the work soon after the war began. All the other women on the sorting benches said they agreed with her. Stacks of letters for suburban districts were growing bigger, ready for despatch by first trams, ferries and buses. Sorters at the suburban offices sort them into "walks’"-i.e., the beats tramped by the post-girls-and the postgirls sort them and pack them into walking order in their bags for house-to-house delivery. I was amused to hear one sorter refer to a post-girl as a walk. After so much of it she must become practically a walk, I can quite see that. If she has far to go to her suburban office she has to be out of bed and walking early — she has to be on deck by 7 a.m. or she won’t get your letters to you for your morning-tea reading. And, about morning-tea, popular letter-re-ceivers remember that walking’s a thirsty business. It’s 10 o'clock, and the sorters are going home. To-morrow morning you'll send your office boy. along with the key, or you'll clear your box yourself on the way to work, or you'll sit in your office or stand in your shop or move about your house or behave in any impatient way you like to think of-till you hear it. And as you-hear the whistle, you'll probably still call out, from force of habit, ‘"Postman’s been!"

J.