[imagesource:wikicommons]

The South African Post Office seems to have adopted an unofficial motto of ‘better late than never.’

A Durban family, the Hanekoms were amused to find two ‘shabby’ parcel arrival notification slips in their mailbox last week. The initial surprise of receiving anything in their seldom-used post box turned to amazement when they collected the parcel only to see it had been sent more than a decade ago.

Sanja Hanekom and her husband took the ‘barely legible documents’ to their local post office and after having to pay a R65 release fee, they were amazed to see post office staff drag out a battered old cardboard package. The parcel looked to have had better days, but post office employees were unable to say when, or who, had sent the ‘time capsule’, only giving them the standard government employee inaudible mumble that could mean anything.

The waybill and postal stamp however indicated that the parcel had been sent 13 years prior, in 2010, by her New York-based father when their teenage son was born.

“We looked at each other in disbelief.”

The package contained several items  — a stack of interior design magazines, a pair of sneakers, a tea set, flavoured teas, and two congratulatory cards from relatives. Sanja sent her father a WhatsApp pic of the parcel but it had been so long ago that he initially didn’t even remember sending it.

Lucky for the Hanekoms, her father had used ‘priority mail’, otherwise they may have had to wait another decade for the package. While it’s unclear what the promised turnaround time for this service was back in 2010, the Post Office’s existing expedited mail service should take 4-5 business days for international destinations.

So close…

“The South African Postal Office will take good care of your parcel and deliver it to you in due time, that is if you are still alive and have not moved to another address.”

The South African Post Office (SAPO) has cultivated a reputation for poor service, and despite the package being delivered a decade too late, it is perhaps a miracle that it arrived intact (sort of) at all.

Believe it or not, SAPO is actually mandated by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) to deliver their mail within a prescribed time. No seriously.

According to ICASA, the service managed to get close to its delivery target of 92% only once since the Hanekom parcel was sent, managing to successfully deliver 89.25% of its mail within the allowed time in the 2019/2020 financial year. This was however probably a fluke and since then SAPO has gone back to its inefficient self.

Mybroadband, who published the original article, recently tested SAPO by putting a tracker into a parcel that was sent from Gqeberha to Centurion. The package arrived in Joburg after two months, but with no notice sent to the recipient, the post office sent it to Durban after 184 days, only for it to be rerouted back to Gqeberha again.

Packages sent via private couriers between the same two destinations have typically taken less than a week to go from origin to final destination.

The post office has been approached for comment and we can expect a reply sometime in early 2037.

We’ll keep you posted.

[source:mybroadband]