We find that those who promise lower power costs or greater enlightenment usually travel in pairs.
The delivery drivers work alone, and some certainly lack confidence when stepping into some properties. Perhaps this is another instance of less rewarding work offered to those who feel they have little choice despite being less able.
There are plenty of risks in urban areas other than what’s behind the gate?
On AP but diverging.
Even our local postie (contractor) said he has given up after his run area was doubled (no increase to income) due to the fall off in deliveries. And he did his run on a bike. The new contractor has a shiny Korean car? The ladies do need to get out to reach our letter box. Good to see their enterprise. Just waiting for AP to ask us to move it to where every car that turns in our drive can knock it over?
It would be simpler if AP formalised all our mail to go to our PO Box, and also smaller deliveries. Currently there is an added cost for redirection on top of having a P.O. Box. This added cost could be offset by dropping all house mail outside of town? Would align precisely with the NBN delivery?
No doubt AP know this and are waiting to force us all to an extra paid services. At least you can still pay bills over the counter at the PO.
The bigger deliveries such as water pumps, tractor and car parts usually go on a specialist carrier who has no trouble with delivery. These drivers seem to have no problems with fulfilment.
Wandering a little, I have recently become aware that the United States postal service has a free service whereby they scan all mail being delivered to an address and make the scans available to the resident. There are hurdles to demonstrate who you are so it is not open slather.
You see the scans via a web account or an app showing how many letters and how may parcels you should expect on a day, with a multiday index. My presumption is it is a response to mail theft (reputation and customer service) as well as delivery problems where there is scope for unintended human error putting the right mail in the right box.
I do not know if they offer the imaging service everywhere, noting the US has areas still with old school mailboxes per home to cluster mailboxes/parcel boxes on a pillar serving a street.
Yes, not about parcels, but still on reliable delivery.
if you can (a) keep it out of GMail or Microsoft would be better.
and (b) having a neutral and secure email service provider would be great.
By considering this an option with AP in the middle are we about to open another privacy debate and the state’s right to read all our digital content with AP?
Of course the sender could not use paper and send it digitally directly to a virtual mailbox. One where you have some way of controlling or authorising what mail you can receive by sender detail or group. Perhaps this also enables the use of a certificate system and encryption of the contents. Sounds like something we might want but will not get any support from The Minister for Home Affairs. Perhaps if he were to run it?
Pulled two parcel collection cards out of the PO box one day last week. It was a couple of minutes before the closing time of the parcel window but they were gone.
Made a special trip the next day. No parcels to collect. I am expecting a few parcels over the next couple of weeks. The explanation was they must have put the cards in the wrong PO box …
I thought we were the only ones to have the same experience when the PO staff brought out a parcel that was not addressed to us.
We may still do a little better than some. The AP tracking app tells us 30mins after we go to bed the parcel is due tomorrow. Followed by a due today email several hours after the parcel it is delivered or the - you were not at home card - quietly enters the front letter box. Call at the local post office after 4pm.
The best so far have been parcels marked to be left in a safe place if not at home being delivered by leaving them leaning up against the fence post next to our letter box. Might be safe if the AP delivery driver thought our farm gate and 4 strand barbed wire fence was there to keep the dog in! Why anyone would imagine the large scats in the front yard were from a 210cm tall dog is beyond me. It’s obvious they are from the feral cat. Not as realistic an excuse as the meter reader who objected to the 3m baby python on the verandah. The little one is closer to 2m long. The big one is longer than the tape and won’t stay still while you muck about. Is it reasonable to expect AP delivery staff in the more rural parts should be more knowledgeable of such things?
I recently ordered some items from interstate that I paid an extra 7$ for express - and to my shock and amazement they took 2 days! I am outside the express guaranteed zone, and frankly I might as well be outside the universe it seems from the mindset of Australia Post, but 2 days was amazing.
Sadly it was considered unsuitable for my parcel locker, the parcel being over the weight limit. I didn’t realise there is a weight limit, but it is clearly stated on their (variable) conditions.
Not knowing this at the time, I asked why it wasn’t suitable - ‘too heavy’ was the reply. I asked what the weight limit was - ‘about 10 kg’ was the reply. I love the ‘about’. Their website actually lists the limit as 16 kg (wish that worked with the fuzz - officer I was going about 100 km/h - where 160 is ‘about’, but I digress). I asked why there was a weight limit - the answer was because they don’t get to choose which locker it is loaded in, so if it is a high locker it is unsafe to lift. Apparently even if the locker was at waist height, its still a risk to lift. Of course the item had been lifted onto the counter to be scanned when I collected it - a little over waist height. The item also had a large Australia Post postage label attached to it listing the weight, the consignment/tracking number and my parcel locker details.
If anyone from Australia Post is reading this, I hope you see where this is going, or at least you are keeping up …
So, if the delivery address, tracking number and weight are all on the same label, at least at one point in time a system with access to all this information was able to collate it to the point of printing the label and charging the sender. Of course we know this can all be collated end to end, so there are two obvious questions - firstly, why would the locker loading process not pick a safe locker to load the parcel into? for example, one that is no higher than the counter where they’d have to lift it in lieu of the locker … and secondly, why tell me it won’t be loaded into a locker at the time of delivery? Why not advise me when the postage is paid? This is important, because it affects my ability to receive the parcel in a reasonable time-frame - lockers are 24x7 - the parcel window is only weekdays an Saturday mornings.
It’s wonderful to use computers to automate our lives, but I don’t think automating ‘stupid’ is a stunning idea … even though it left me a little stunned
The home page indicates they are moving to a new platform, but still more than just seriously wanting for a clue about how to do it. That is truly incompetent, to be polite.
On the new page that opens enter your reference number and tick the boxes and prove you aren’t a robot and you should be able to see where your delivery is.
The page you ended up at before is their FAQ page…doesn’t make much sense does it.
I don’t have a current number to test it with though. But an old number still works on the first site I provided and lists the details on when sent and received.
Doesn’t make sense, but sadly it is completely to be expected.
It works for any business Australia Lost is involved in - the tracking tells you the tiny part of the picture they are prepared to release, to the best of their systems ability, which is dubious on a really really […] really good day …
What could go wrong? I guess they just need to program it to deliver ‘collect at the post office’ cards and dump every third item in a river on the way back to base …
What if someone is travelling the other way on the footpath? in a wheelchair for example?
“There were no technical or safety incidents during the trial and we have secured community and regulator support to keep exploring this technology.”
Absolutely nothing once Google, Uber Post and others get the green light to send their versions out on the street.
Of course AP would as @draughtrider suggests retain the IP for the software that selects which item to place in which letter box, ensuring current standards are not compromised. I wonder how it deals with opening the front gate and leaving a parcel in a safe place.
Our footpath is a challenge for a 4wd farm tractor.
Perhaps the Boston Dynamics version? But will it get the tooting horn and run upgrade?
Current standards leave somewhat to be desired. There is a system that allocates each address to a locality and postcode. The assumption is that the postcode map in its database is correct because AP is the authority, they determine the postcodes, and therefore their system by definition resolves every address correctly. The problem with this is that it assumes physical delivery is performed according to this determination. In head office of course this is true. In the real world it isn’t.
In my case small organisations who just use my given address without question get their material delivered on time, big organisations who use the AP database get theirs delivered very slowly or not at all because the system ‘corrects’ the locality and postcode. This results in the item is sent to the wrong post office that does not deliver to me. A human has to then re-address it and put it back into the system to go round again through the exchange to the correct post office that does deliver it - rather late. This is assuming that there is a human who understands the failure of the system and who actually gives a rat’s. Too many items mysteriously disappear or get RTS despite having the correct address.
But wait there’s more.
Some organizations use AP as their mailing bureau. If they do there is no in-house human override, no matter how many times I complain and get their service people to change my mail address to the one that works the system ‘corrects’ it on the run and always sends it to the ‘correct’ address that doesn’t work. There is no solution to this problem other than to have my correspondence from such organisations emailed where possible. This contributes to the ever accelerating reduction of profitability of the snailmail system. Well done oh good and faithful servant!
It turns out that the parcel was delivered to my local Australia Post agency on the 23rd. I happened to be in the shop on other business today and the owner mentioned the mail that had been waiting for a week.
The sequence of events:
22nd - dispatched from Adelaide;
I was emailed a link that didn’t work;
23rd - delivered Newcastle, then to a small village up the valley;
Adelaide to Newcastle in a day or so. Quite impressive so far;
Star Track database updated to show delivery to Newcastle (which I wouldn’t know about, if not for @grahroll);
Then, nothing. No email, no SMS, not even a card in my letter box. If they’d even updated the Star Track database to show the true location it would have helped (unless I was still relying on their dodgy link).
