Postie baffled by parcel, but locals help find right destination
It was enough to baffle the postie, but with a little help from small town Cantabrians, an unusually addressed package reached its destination.
The package was addressed to ‘‘Kay and Philip, on a farm, situated up a long drive with cows, opposite Cust pub or thereabouts’’.
Cust is a rural North Canterbury village, about 15 minutes west of Rangiora. It is home to about 450 people.
New Zealand Post opted to drop it to the Cust service station.
The service station posted a photo of the package on its Facebook in the hope of tracking down the intended recipient. The Facebook post attracted more than 2000 shares and 196 comments.
The next day, someone cracked it – and Kay Forrester got a call.
Although Kay and her husband, Philip, live on a farm in Fernside – a small settlement 12km east of Cust – they thought the address sounded like a description of their farm.
The sender of the package was 70-year-old Irene Meekings, who previously visited the farm with a relative.
‘‘She’s almost blind so she wouldn’t have seen where she was going and she couldn’t remember our address or surname,’’ Forrester said. ‘‘She was going from memory.’’
Meeking loves sewing and she often makes gifts for people. The parcel contained a sewn clothes peg apron and a table cloth.
‘‘It’s quite sweet. I was just surprised and tickled pink that it actually managed to get here,’’ Forrester said.
Other small town southerners shared similar postal experiences on the Cust Service Centre’s Facebook post.
Melanie Dalton said her family owned a large and ‘‘very distinctive’’ white goat they kept tethered on a long wire across from their house in Balclutha, a small town in Otago. ‘‘We got a letter years ago asking for the letter to be delivered to ‘‘the old house with the pretty garden ... across the road from the big white goat with one horn. We got the letter!’’
Another said she once got a letter with her name, Lisa Norrie, and ‘‘the butterfly house opposite the school’’ as the address.
A New Zealand Post spokeswoman said mail addressed to vague addresses, such as ‘‘Grandma on Main Street’’, occasionally slipped through the system.
‘‘Sometimes the local knowledge of those working in our postal network does help locate the correct address to deliver these items to.
‘‘With mail increasingly being sorted by machine it is important that correct address formats are used, and we encourage customers to verify addresses.’’
If the sender’s details have not been provided it will be held for three months, then destroyed or disposed of.