In the UK Posties tend to be on foot… walking up and down streets, up and down steps, stairs, driveways etc… filling letter boxes and moving on. Here in Oz of course things are never that simple. The posties races around neighbourhoods on mopeds with sacks full of mail in panniers on the side. Done, I suppose, to save time covering the distances between boxes in the wider frontages we tend to have.
To make deliveries even easier… there are rules about where and how postboxes are to be sited. The general rule is they can’t be on the side of the road… partly because of the danger of cars parking and blocking the box slot… partly because motorists here are just too damned dangerous. So… they are kept roughly parallel to the ‘nature strip’… that little piece of greenery that belongs to the house in theory, but in practice can’t be built on or used for enything sensible.
In our case, we have a box built into the wall… handy for both the postie and us. Well it *was* until laughing boy here decided how nice it would be to cover up the manhole cover (sited directly in front of the post box) with a pot and small orange tree. I left it far enough forwards for the postie plus bike to get through… I thought… but had I? Apparantly not. The local postie has complained to his convenor that because it’s on a slight hill… it’s hard to negotiate between the box and the pot without danger of toppling over.
So the convenor came round and explaine the problem. My first reponse to the guy was “You are not serious?”… but he was. Swallowing my usual response… i.e. to tell them to get stuffed… I decided discretion was the better part of valour in this case… especially as I wanted to continue getting mail 🙂 so I agreed initially I’d move the pot… and also I’d source a free standing one that I can place almost in the street (next to a tree) which would actually suit them and us a lot better… for a start it would keep the bike off the grass in wet weather which *always* leaves deep ruts! All I hope is that the council doesn’t get wind of it and make us move *that* as well 🙂
So… to add to the rest of my chores I now have to move that heavy pot out of the way… go buy a free standing mail box… make a concrete base… errect the new box… and move the pot back. Grrr….
Some of me still thinks anyone who can’t negotiate that gap on a moped shouldn’t allowed on the road to begin with but there ya go… sometimes you just have to bend in the wind.
Tell ya what tho… our regular postie can forget his Christmas Box this year!!!
The Eclectic Interweb 