australian rozie

I received one of those cards from Australia Post saying that they had Registered Post to deliver to me, because I wasn’t home. I needed to pick it up from the Strawberry Hills Business Centre. Is Strawberry Hills even a real suburb, like East Redfern? Luckily I have spare time to go down to the actual post office to pick up mail. The card was received on a Thursday but I couldn’t get to the post office until the following Monday. It was a very warm day mind you, summer is coming. Firstly, I go into the wrong building in the business complex on Cleveland Street, the security guy tells me to go down some stairs into the post office shop, I queue up there and then get told I can’t pick up parcels here, I need to go to the roller door window outside to the right of the main shop. So I queue up at the parcel pick up window and give the postal service worker my card. He looks around for it for a while but he says he can’t find it. “It’s not here.” (Well where the **** is it?). He said sometimes the postman says it’s going to be there but it’s not, it’s gone somewhere else. He suggests it may have gone to the Surry Hills post office. He does give me a customer complaint form and a number to call before I head off to Surry Hills (where I’d just come from). So I have to call Australia Post on my mobile, while standing out the front of Australia Post (nb still very warm). A voice message tells me I am unable to speak to anyone as they are all too busy. I am asked to leave my name, number and a message and someone will call me back between 2:00 and 2:30pm (or something like that). It is about 10:30am at this time. I start to get annoyed, I don’t even know what the registered post package is, I can’t think of what could be so important but I need to get it. I leave a terse message and hope they will call me back.
I decided that I may as well go to the Surry Hills post office as it’s on my way back home, on the off chance that the parcel would be there (and the closest post office to my home). So I queue up in the Surry Hills post office (now remember what I said about post offices before Christmas last year?) I give my special card to a woman at the counter. She looks around a bit & says she can’t find it there, but has tracked it to a “sorting” centre in Waterloo. I’m getting really annoyed now because I got the card on Thursday and it’s now Monday.
Luckily, the Honka Princess had given me a call earlier, so we met up for lunch at Cafe Zoe. We did a bit of shopping in Newtown & Alexandria for a while until I finally got a call back from Australia Post (about 20 minutes after they said they would call). They told me that my package arrived at the Strawberry Hills office at 11am. Argh!!! So Honka Princess kindly drives me back to Strawberry Hills and I finally get my Registered Post parcel. Guess what it was….
My tickets for Sydney Festival ( I forgot they would be sending them to me). I also received a compilation CD of artists performaing at Sydney Festival next year, so that was nice.
So that was my Australia Post semi-long-winded drama.