Courier/​Delivery Agent

Harmony: Hi my name is Harmony and I work for New Zealand Post as a delivery agent, or better known as a postie, in the Porirua branch.

As a postie I deliver mail and parcels to the community. My day starts at 6am.

Hi Leanne.

The first thing that we do in the morning is safety check our Paxsters, so that we know that they’re all good to take out on the run. Yup it’s all good!

We work as a team. We all help each other out. We’ve got our own rounds to sort. If anyone is struggling or behind we can help them sort up and then have a team meeting - a team brief. Get everyone ready for the day. My colleagues are great. It’s a really good team environment.

So at my branch most of us are on Paxsters, but we also have three motorbiking posties, two biking posties and one on foot.

We’ll pull our mail down, we’ll load up our Paxster, and head out onto the run and deliver the mail for the day. So we alternate our rounds day to day and I deliver in about two to three different areas in the Porirua region.

Not every day is the same. So we’re out on a run. It can take anywhere from five to eight hours depending on the volume of the mail. If we’ve finished delivering our mail then we’ll call someone up and see if they need a hand out on the run. We’ll go back and sort up our mail for the next day, or do some admin work inside. We’ll do roughly ten hour days.

Our days are long and can be quite repetitive. The weather can make it quite hard to deliver, so you have to have a really resilient personality.

Before I started we had to do some online training. Just learning about post protocols and procedures, and learning how to scan the products, and also we did a two-day training course on the Paxster, to drive the Paxster safely.

If you wanted to be a delivery agent, I think you’d need to have a confident personality, be able to solve problems in a friendly manner.

Customer: Sweet, thank you so much.

Harmony: No worries, thank you, have a good day.

Customer: You too.

Harmony: I like interacting with people out on the rounds, meeting new people, patting people's dogs. You get a lot of people waving at you and smiling.

Hey Jenny. How are you?

Jenny: Good, thank you.

I enjoy the social aspect of it and I also enjoy being in the outdoors. So once we’ve delivered all our mail we come back to the branch, we clean our Paxster, park it back up, put our missorts away, and then we can sort up our mail for the next day, just to get a head start.

So for me this job is about providing a service to the customers, and just being an honest, reliable delivery agent.

I love this job because you get to work in the outdoors, and you work with a great bunch of people, and it’s a good team environment to work in.