A cross-town shipment expected to take a maximum of five days arrived at its destination a whopping 42 days after it was mailed.
St Leonards resident John Holmes said the 35g package, which is slightly heavier than a large snail, was mailed at the Mosgiel NZ Post Shop on July 22.
It did not arrive in his North Dunedin post office box until last Wednesday, 42 days after it was mailed.
"That’s a distance of 17km, and it took just over 1000 hours to reach us, so it was doing about 17 metres per hour."
That speed translated to about 0.017kmh, and a common garden snail was able to travel as fast as 0.048kmh, nearly three times as fast as the parcel.
"I think it just shows that New Zealand Post is living up to its other name of snail mail," Mr Holmes said.
The parcel had been properly addressed and "beautifully sealed up".
Mr Holmes’ package contained a knob for a 17th century antique chest, which was missing one of its two original knobs.
The remaining knob had been sent to an Outram clock repairer to see if it could be replicated.
Bernadette Hay, of Timepieces NZ, was returning the part to Mr Holmes and said she had been quoted a delivery timeframe of three to five days.
She expected it would be at the lower end of that scale, seeing as it only was going across town.
In the intervening weeks, Mrs Hay exchanged several emails and phone calls with the postal service to locate the package, and had started a compensation claim for a lost item.
Then, out of the blue, an email came saying the item had been found.
"I replied back and just asked them for an actual explanation, to which the response was ‘oh, we were just happy that we got the parcel’ and she didn’t ask [where it was found]."
Now that his package was safe and well Mr Holmes could see the funny side of the delay, and was amused further by a letter he received the next day.
The letter said that his address had been randomly selected to receive a tracked letter from New Zealand Post so it could test the performance of its network.
He planned to write them a letter with feedback on their network performance.
New Zealand Post was contacted for comment, but had not responded in time for publication.
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Yes - NZ must have one of the worst services in the world. We received a letter from Dunedin hospital notifying of an appointment for an MRI scan that took 15 days to get cross town, three days after the due date. Fortunately we got a text reminder from the hospital. A package sent to us from China in July has been held up by NZPost in Auckland since August 11 and we are still waiting. NZ is slowly but surety becoming a third world country!