Life never dull for Canada Post clerks
Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Feb 16/01) - Mary Lou Speelman would make a heck of a blackjack dealer. The Canada Post mail clerk shuffles over 6,000 letters a day.
She's worked for 11 years in Yellowknife's mail distribution centre.
The always smiling Speelman steams through mail like clockwork. Standing in front of colour co-ordinated boxed shelves, she flicks letters through in machine gun succession.
"It's like typing," says Speelman as she flicks a series of letters into a shelve labelled Hay River.
"You just know where to put the letters," she says.
Speelman works in the dispatch section of the distribution centre. Here she sorts outgoing mail. The clerks rotate sections every four months.
Every morning she gets a new load of mail. It's sorted, airmail is weighed and then sent out.
As she tells this she pulls out two letters with no postage or return address.
"I guess we'll have to send them and tax the recipient," says Speelman.
Taxing means the receiver must pay for the postage.
She says the load has increased with the onset of Valentines.
"We get lots of envelopes with little hearts and those little Valentines little kids send," says Speelman.
But the postal clerks received an unwelcome piece of mail on Tuesday.
Someone dropped sardines into a mail-box and it stained various pieces of mail.
"We had to clean off the mail as best we could," says Speelman calmly.
"It was sort of gross," she says.
And the best thing about her work?
"The people I work with are great and the bosses are nice," she says with a smile.
