Mail carriers still busy in holiday season

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Despite more practical and sophisticated ways of sending festive greetings, such as via the Internet or short message service (SMS), to loved ones and relatives, the old snail mail tradition of sending cards or letters with a personal touch seemed to keep the mail carriers busy during the holidays.

The head of the processing center at the central post office in Jakarta, Mursalim, said Thursday that there was a 150 percent increase in mail handled during the peak season -- two weeks before Idul Fitri, which fell on Nov. 25.

"During normal days, the mail volume to send and receive could only reach 20 tons a day, but during the peak season it reached up to 50 tons per day," he told The Jakarta Post.

According to Mursalim, the most significant increase was in the package service. He said that during the peak season, the number of packages increased to 100 tons, a leap compared to the usual 60 tons a day.

Not to the joy of the mail carriers, in the two weeks of post- holiday season, said Mursalim, it estimated an increase of between 30 percent and 50 percent in mail volume from the usual 100,000 letters handled each day.

But not all maintain the old custom just because it's much more personal that way.

Saptono, 28, who works on a joint project involving the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Home Affairs, said that he always used the mail service to send greetings to his sister who lives in Batang village, Tegal in Central Java.

"Technology is a luxury in Batang, where cellular phones and the Internet don't exist. That is why I choose the conventional way: sending greeting cards," he told the Post.

Mursalim acknowledged that business was slack as people tended to use SMS rather than the ordinary mail service.

A cellular operator company boasted that the number of SMS users would reach five million per day, while another operator predicted four million a day during the holidays.

Given the facts, state-run postal company PT Pos Indonesia tried to keep up with the rapid growth of communication and information technology by adding new products, such as SMS-Post, Electronic Mail or Ratron Post and Prisma, a product that offers customers a stamp with their own picture on it.

Through the newly-launched SMS-Post product, in cooperation with major cellular operator companies, customers do not have to go to the post office to send cards. They just need to send a message containing the full address of the recipient to the access numbers provided by the operators.

The message will then be forwarded to the destination post office, which then will send a card with a certain design chosen by the customer to the recipient's address.

The central post office's head of the express delivery unit, Louis, said the publicity for the new service was not clear enough.

"The customers have misinterpreted the service with the usual SMS, they sent greeting words instead of typing the full address of the recipient," he said.