![]() She was, she replied, frostily.Post-Haste Mail Center is located at 600 F St in Arcata, CA - Humboldt County and is a business with Notary Public on staff. When she suggested my nearest post office was at 250 Elizabeth Street, I pointed out that this was a retail outlet, not a mail centre.Īt this point, suspecting she might in fact be ringing from a call centre in Bangalore with an adopted Australian accent, I politely inquired whether she was in Melbourne. When I explained that in the decade since our GPO was lost to haute couture my parcels were routinely sent to the nearby mail centre at 380 Bourke Street, the corporate woman insisted there was no such place. My suggestion that Australia Post's inability to cope with routine parcel delivery in the CBD might be newsworthy provoked a call from Australia Post head office. There were lots of parcels coming into the city, delivery to one's nearest mail centre was not a right and as the William Street post office was less than a kilometre from my place of residence I would have to lump it. This was not a problem, but business as usual, I was curtly informed. Once more, instead of landing at the mail centre just around the corner, our parcels were being dumped several blocks away at the Law Courts Post Office in William Street.Īfter trudging over there for the third time in as many weeks, my resistance dissolved and I made a fatal move - I rang Australia Post.īut this time, instead of the usual excuses about the errant delivery system and promises of better days ahead, I got short shrift. The little blue and red calling card that arrived early in the week confirmed that our erratic mail service was having another of its ''episodes'' - the dreaded parcel divert was back. So much for 150 magnificent years of history. The no-longer-fashionable enterprise of the mail was banished: stamps sales to the shop next door and letters, parcels and post boxes to the back of a nondescript office building around the corner. So the grand Victorian edifice we had previously, and quite naively, regarded as a building held in trust for the people of Victoria as a centre of civic purpose - like Parliament House, Flinders Street Station and the Exhibition Building - was flogged off to accommodate a bunch of fancy-pants retailers and create a couple more coffee shops in a city desperate for coffee shops. I trace the rot back a decade or so to when the brains trust at Australia Post decided running a general post office at the General Post Office was no longer a viable business model for a public service subsidiary responsible for getting mail in and out of mail boxes. And God knows how many of ours got lost in translation. Three for us, four for the folks upstairs, two for the restaurant below us and yet another one for the Chinese bloke over the road. Wednesday's post was typical - a three-out-of-10 day. ![]() But even in the shadow of that grand Victorian clock tower in Elizabeth Street, the mail is as fickle as Melbourne's weather. ![]() ![]() And you can trust me on this because, well, I'm a journalist, and for the past week I have been on a tough and thankless assignment: traversing the city in search of my wayward mail.įor the best part of 20 years, on and off, I have lived a stone's throw from the GPO. Today - at least in the case of Australia Post - the cheque has been replaced by the parcel. Like ''Trust me, I'm a journalist'', this statement long ago transformed from being an expression of assurance into a euphemism for deceit. ![]()
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