Philippa Stevenson: Give the postie a fair chance - fix your mailbox

If it were up to me, about half the mail sent to rural boxes would not get through.

The last item I'd place in the plethora of pitiful excuses for mailboxes would be a warning that if the owners wanted mail then they'd better get a decent repository fast.

Owners could also look seriously at placement. Is it conveniently sited for them or the poor bod trying to deliver their mail?

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning I set out with Waikato rural delivery driver Warren Hodges.

Most days during a pre-breakfast walk I exchange a wave with Warren or his wife, Wendy. I return home, get the mail they've left and enjoy a quiet read over my blueberry smoothie.

It's a pleasant start to the day for me but what is it like for the NZ Post contractors who ensure the mail gets through to us far-flung country dwellers six days a week, year-round in all weather?

Their working day starts while I'm still under the duvet. I find it hard enough hauling myself out just once to meet Warren at Hamilton's busy NZ Post depot at 3am.

Mail stacked in flat boxes for Waikato's 10 RD (rural delivery) runs is trundled into the depot in trolleys from a nearby sorting room.

In individual sorting areas each contractor matches names and addresses with a multi-level filing system of upright slots organised by the recipients' place on a road.

It bamboozles me. It's not alphabetical - it's not even consecutive by street number. If I match an address on a letter with a number and a road, the name doesn't always correspond.

My address is an example. I've been there 16 years but the name Stevenson isn't printed below my designated slot - just that of my longer-resident partner. I've always got my mail because the contractor "just knows" that's where Stevenson mail goes, including that of my children during their occasional occupations.

Some matches seem positively intuitive, for instance company names with no bearing on the name of the registered boxholder. Warren says that when he took on the run four years ago, it took him a month to learn who and what belonged where. The filing order becomes clearer when we start winding round the roads.

After more than three hours of sorting and stacking the van - a real art unless you want to constantly stop to run to the back of the vehicle for the next lot of mail - we hit the road at 6.30am.

I'm yawning but Warren is all go - energetically manoeuvring the van back and forth across near-empty roads, swinging it within paint sheen of letterboxes to lean out his window, open the hatch and place the mail.

Between stops he hardly seems to look where he's going as he grabs the next recipient's lot.

His ability to navigate to the next box is uncanny, even to him.

"Sometimes I just look up and I'm there," he says.

But I see his intense concentration, eyes darting from mail to road to destination. He never fails to look before he pulls out. He's never had an accident on the run, which threads over fast-flowing State Highway 1.

The biggest challenge is the boxes. Warren has adapted to their eccentricities and awkward placements that force him to drive inventively - looping in, backing up and stopping to leap out.

But I become incensed. Do some box-holders think it's a game of "Hide the box" - put it in the most screamingly difficult place to access; grow the prickliest plant round and even in it - or do they want to see how long it lasts before disintegrating?

We're in an area that reeks of money. Signs for costly security services are on the same gateposts as mailboxes so dilapidated you wonder whether their owners want mail at all, or at least secure and dry stuff.

One box toppled three months ago and is still upended. Another, on its dug-out post, is propped unreachably high against a fence.

One is a plastic bucket laid on its side with a hole cut in the bottom. Many are too small or have tiny slots facing the road but substantial openings to the rear. Too few are regulation front-opening boxes.

Boxes teeter on deep ditches or have potholes or piles of earth in front of them, making the trip like a cross-country rally.

A third of the boxes are inaccessible from the van-driver's side. Only one in 900 gets Warren's highest praise of "That's a bloody good box, that".

He wonders why people can't simply drive by their box to collect their mail and see how convenient - or not - it is for the postie.

It's a logical idea. At the very least it would be a courtesy to people who work hard in tough conditions to give us a prized service.

I began to think that for this part of the postal service alone 45c for a standard stamp seems very cheap.