NZ POST TOLD TO GET HARD

"Get hard.' That's the message to New Zealand Post from a group of Moenui residents about a request to modify or shift their letterboxes.
New Zealand Post this week delivered requests to a number of residents asking that they change their delivery arrangements for the sake of postie safety.
"Postal Delivery staff are telling us of problems with dogs and difficult-to-get-to letter-boxes," said a Post Office spokesman. "We are asking for co-operation from the public on this."

But a local lobby group claims it is a cost-cutting exercise. 'Postbusters of Moenui' has been established to 'resist moves by bureaucrats and bean-counters to sanitise the job of postie and reduce the quality of the service.'
"It's just another cut-back," spokesperson Elsie Parr-Sell told the Kiwi Herald. "There was a time when posties made sure the mail made it through, no matter where the recipient lived. Down-town office or tiny shack on a long country road-it didn't matter. Posties were proud, determined people."
Mrs Parr-Sell said that 'insisting mail-boxes become drearily uniform receptacles at the end of non-descript drive-ways is a further step toward corporate fascism,' and said she would not be moving her letter-box from the top of her kanuka tree 'for the sake of any lazy postman.'
"Postbusters" members the Herald spoke to supported their leader. Meka valley goat farmer Serge Yordy whose post box is down a 300 metre cliff said that he had "put in the long rope for the climbing down to the post-box. When the posting man brings the letter I give him a ladle of my best goats milk and sometimes a yodel."
Hone Te Ika whose letter box is in the middle of the fast flowing Kuri River says that when NZ post complained that it's postal delivery staff did not want to ford the river with mail he "met them half way and moved the letter box from the bank of the river to the middle. You can't say fairer than that can you?" Mr Te Ika told The Herald.

Retired postie Bindy Irwen agrees with the Postbusters group saying that modern posties need to 'get hard.' "Thirty years ago when I was on the bike there was nothing more exhilarating than wrestling a pit-bull or defusing a letter box bomb so you could deliver a letter from someones Gran."