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A total of 120,000 parcels, cards and letters will be handled by staff at the Bridgend Delivery Office every day in the run up to Christmas
Carwyn Jones made his annual Christmas visit to the Royal Mail delivery office in BridgendCarwyn Jones made his annual Christmas visit to the Royal Mail delivery office in Bridgend
Parcels addressed only to “Nan and Gramps” and tiny Christmas cards not even big enough for a stamp are just two of the many trials faced by postal workers during December.
As schools and offices wind down, Royal Mail staff face longer hours and enormous workloads as they battle to deliver tens of thousands of cards and parcels every day in the run up to Christmas Day.
Bridgend AM Carwyn Jones joined staff at the town’s Tremains Road delivery office on Thursday to thank them for their hard work and also to offer a hand in sorting some mail.
“I have been coming here for 15 years and what’s changed is a real shift towards parcels.
“I think we should all pay tribute to our hard working postal workers for making sure the presents are delivered on time,” said Mr Jones.
“I think that members of the public think a lot of the work that is done here is done by machine, but it’s done by hand.”
Carwyn Jones made his annual Christmas visit to the Royal Mail delivery office in Bridgend
Mr Jones helped some staff as they undertook the mammoth task of putting countless cards and letters into slots for houses and businesses across the Bridgend county area so they can be bundled together before delivery.
Caroline Rich, delivery sector manager, told Mr Jones he had joined them on “parcel mania” day as gifts bought on the internet on the weekend arrived for delivery.
“The number of large parcels we will deliver is probably in the region of 17,000 to 18,000 today, around 8,000 items more than normal,” said delivery office manager Robert Helyar .
“In total, there are probably 115,000 to 120,000 items (letters and parcels) to be delivered today.”
The Bridgend delivery office serves homes in Bridgend, Porthcawl and the Ogmore, Garw and Llynfi valleys.
Such is the volume of mail at this time of year that staff work through the night and the office deploys 89 vans six days a week, each carrying two postmen.
An added problem is the amount of wrongly or poorly-addressed post that pours into the Royal Mail in December.
A lack of postcodes, poor handwriting, red festive envelopes and the use of metallic pen make much of it impossible for the sophisticated machines in Cardiff – which do an initial sort of posted items – to read, so it has to be sorted by hand in Bridgend.
“We get parcels addressed just to Nan and Gramps,” said Robert.
The sorting office also gets cards loosely addressed to people in Bridgend that give no street names or postcode and some that should have gone to Bridgend, Daviot, which is around 500 miles away in Inverness.
“It’s probably a good quarter of the mail at Christmas that has to be hand sorted,” said postman Dylan Page , 40, from Pontycymmer, who delivers to Sarn.
“My bugbear with the post at Christmas is the wrong addressesand the world’s tiniest cards. Some of them are so small you can’t even get the stamp on them!”
He added that people also fail to keep their Christmas card lists up to date.
“A woman gave me a card back yesterday and said the woman it was addressed to has been dead for eight years.”
Last year the Royal Mail handled 115 million parcels across the UK in December, with 10 million delivered on the busiest day.