IF YOU want your Christmas cards delivered on time, get them posted no later than December 18, a senior postal service official said yesterday. Any later than that and they will end up arriving after Christmas Day.
“Anything posted before the 18th and the 27th will be sorted and distributed before Christmas and New Year respectively,” said postal services head, Vassos Vassiliou.
There will be no postal service on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or New Year’s Day. On Boxing Day, however, post-box collectors in all districts would be collecting post and delivering it to the Latsia sorting office, which would also be open.
Early delivery could only be guaranteed for internal mail, as distribution overseas would depend on whether or not there was a direct flight to the country of destination and how efficient foreign postal services were once the item arrived, he said.
“We will send all post abroad up until, and including, December 23. However, we cannot guarantee timely delivery because of two factors. One, if a country is far away, such as Australia, there is no direct flight, so post might travel for a two days before it even reaches there. And second, if the quality of service is bad within the country of destination, it is beyond our control,” he said. European countries usually had top quality delivery service, but third world countries could take five to 10 days to deliver post.
Nonetheless, the earlier cards and packages were sent, the better, he advised.
“It’s like setting out for work in the morning. You might leave home at 7.20am and arrive at work 25 minutes early, but if you wait an extra five minutes hoping to time it better, you end up 15 minutes late. The same could apply to posting cards. If you send them earlier, they might arrive too early, but at least you won’t have the anxiety that they’ll get there too late,” said Vassiliou.
December sees a 35-40 per cent workload increase compared to the rest of the year, he said. According to postal service statistics, for the first 11 months of 2001, postal activity, recording outgoing and incoming postal items, averaged at 6,416,000 postal items per month. In December, this figure was predicted to increase to 8,673,000, he said.
Greece and the United Kingdom shared the top two positions for outgoing mail, followed by the United States and Germany. The same applied for incoming mail, he said.
People wishing to send parcels abroad should take into account that they took longer to deliver than cards, he said.
“All parcels are screened by customs as a precaution, because they could for example contain drugs or weapons. And, sometimes, the sender might be taxed for something he is sending and so must be notified, and subsequently pay the tariff, before it is even distributed to the receiver,” said Vassiliou. “This procedure takes time and, depending on the country and its efficiency, delays post.”
In order to deal with the influx of work during this busy time, the postal service employs seasonal staff for three months while permanent staff work three to four hours overtime, depending on where they were posted.
“We hire around 80 temporary employees from job agencies to cover the entire island, starting from mid-November till the end of February, so that they can help out permanent staff, who are under a lot of pressure. Half of them are sorters and the rest are distributors.”
There had been fears that temporary postal workers would be laid off this year and that no one would be asked to work overtime, due to complications concerning the services’ budget.
“When the Finance Ministry calculated our wages budget we were given £5 million for the year, which was to include temporary staff wages and overtime payments. But, sums of this vast amount are hard to calculate in advance and sometimes in practice you end up needing more,” said Vassiliou, adding that thankfully, the problem had been sorted out in time.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
