Stamp collecting should be fun. It is usually much less fun that it ought to be, though. The chief culprit is Australia Post. It was not until I began buying stamps over the Internet some six month ago that I began to realise how glacially slow the Australian postal system has become. Is it only because I so eagerly await the arrival of every batch of stamps I order that I have noticed the paradox that in the so-called age of global communications mail in this country seems to have slowed to something like it must have been before World War II? Surely someone else has noticed this too???
Let me give an example. On the day of writing, Friday, November 19, a small package of about ten stamps still hasn't arrived from Russia, a package that, the seller assures me, she posted on October 19. An envelope containing a Manchukuo first day cover still hasn't reached me - although it was posted in London on November 8. How can it take longer than a few days for a letter to reach Sydney from London? Even in 1980, when I was living in London, mail between the cities took an average of 5-7 days and never more than 7. A third item was posted in Turkey on the same date but also still hasn't arrived.
You can say if you like that there's nothing unusual about letters taking a long time to come from places like Russia and Turkey, which are presumably steeped in bureaucratic inefficiency, but it's hard to say that about London. In any case, my worst two experiences so far concern the United States. This year, the longest an item took to arrive was 7 weeks; this item, which consisted of just a few stamps, was posted in Florida. The second longest was a small packet of 138 stamps posted in New York, which took five weeks to arrive. Both these items were, of course, sent by air mail. The inordinate length of time they took to arrive rather makes a mockery of the very idea of air mail, since it seems that the envelopes bearing these items are spending most of their journey somewhere other than in the air. I strongly doubt that even in 1930 items sent by air took as long as 5 or 7 weeks to reach Australia from the U.S. I wonder whether I might receive my stamps more expeditiously if I asked sellers to send my items across the ocean by canoe or overland by camel train.
In the last six months, I've probably ordered around 100-120 packets of stamps from overseas. In only a handful of cases did a packet arrive in a period of less than 9 or 10 days. The average probably has been about 9-10 days, which is considerably longer than international mail has taken for decades. Given that, in 1995, mail between Vienna and Sydney took an average of just three days, I must admit to being completely baffled by this unexpected situation.
The advent of Internet shopping is supposed to have brought us a step closer towards the nirvana of instant consumer gratification. Yet if you live in metropolitan Sydney - not in the sticks, but right in the heart of one of the world's major cities - that promise is denied by the astonishing slowness of the Australian postal system. Half the time I've almost forgotten what I've ordered before the stamps reach me. Few things dampen the pleasure of stamp collecting as much as having to wait weeks for an item to arrive. Few things seem as inexplicable. Am I the only person who wonders why, in this so-called age of rapid global communications, the postal system has made a leap backwards into the era before I was even born? What's happened? And why?
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