Going postal

When I was a kid, my parents knew the name of the milkman. My brothers and I knew the name of the milkman. He came every day and dropped the milk on the front stairs. In 600ml bottles with those aluminium lids. Sometimes we’d wait for him out front at dawn and add chocolate milks to the bill. The thrill of the moment outweighed the consequences of later.

Mum and Dad knew the garbage man. He came up the side of our house, carted the old-school bin down to the garbage truck and back again. He got a few tallies of beer for Christmas for a year of effort.

The milko and the garbo were part of the community. Our community. Our suburb.

In yesteryear, there was also the rabbitoh. It was a poor life back then, and cheap, skinned rabbits were in every suburb. In yester-yesteryear, it was the dunny man, those poor sods who earned threepence taking the waste from your outdoor toilet, or dunny.

Our Paddington terrace has an old dunny lane next to it. And we have a garden bed in our backyard that frames the old dunny line that runs the length of the street. We all have garden beds at the back of our courtyards now. The thin dunny strip was gifted back to house owners decades and decades ago when sewage became the norm.

I thought about all those guys (they were all men, after all, who did those jobs) when my wife and I were walking down a back lane in Paddington the other day.

My wife called out: Hi Amit.

Amit called back: How are you today?

I burst out laughing.

My wife said: What are you laughing at?

I replied: You know the name of the StarTrack delivery guy, and he knows yours.

My wife said: Of course, he comes all the time.

It summed up 2022 for me. Long gone is the milko, the garbo you knew, the rabbitoh, the dunny man. Men who made life convenient in simpler times.

Life changed. Now we have the parcel guy. He’s now the guy who has made life convenient. COVID. The internet. Consumerism. Practicality. Cocooning in our homes. The thrill of a parcel arriving.

Maybe we used to feel the same way about getting a letter. It was exciting. Now emails are a pain in the bum. Too many. Too easy. Thousands of them. But a parcel ...

And the StarTrak guy is now our guy. We used to have lots of guys. But they disappeared as living standards — and consumerism — boomed. And now consumerism has given us this new guy. It’s the cycle of life.

God love him. Good old Amit. The milkman of the modern age. I wonder what he has for me today. I can’t wait.