Today, whilst I waited outside my unit complex in Turner to meet someone, I witnessed what I had always suspected.
An Australia Post contractor (White van with the contractor magnets stuck to it) pulled up and proceeded to pull out a fistful of missed delivery slips and walk directly to the mail boxes of the next door unit complex and insert them without even attempting to deliver by buzzing the specific units.
The contractor then moved onto my complex, and proceeded to do the same. When I challenged him about the fact that he hadn’t even tried to deliver the packages, he said he had tried and no one was home. When I told him that I had been standing right there for the last 5 minutes and had seen everything he got a bit defensive. He then put a slip in my mail box. I then told him that that was my mail box and he hadn’t tried to deliver my package. Well he got a bit more defensive and then finally went to his van to get my package. As he did so, he took my slip and ripped it into a million little pieces and threw it on the road like confetti.
His overall attitude when challenged was pathetic, and his then childish display sealed it.
What gets me is that this is extremely pre-planned. He has all the packages in the back, but he has written out all the slips in advance and is just driving around inserting the slips into the mail boxes. The amount of time this is taking him must be a fraction of the time it takes him to do his job properly, and yet he is probably being paid the same.
I’ve written to Australia Post – and suggest that if you suspect the same or similar practices are affecting you, you should too. I have had no end of problems with contractors from Australia Post. Terrible hand writing, inappropriate delivery times (night time, really early morning weekends) and so on.
As a side note, all direct Australia Post employees have been exceptional in their conduct, (store and/or directly employed delivery persons, be it registered or express etc). This complaint extends only to contractors.