Illustrative stock photo (source: TASR)
A cement mixer with a wheelbarrow, a decorated Christmas tree with Christmas balls, leeches and frozen bird carcasses as food for snakes - even such consignments are sent by customers via the state post office company Slovenská Pošta. Although Slovenská Pošta uses modern machines for sorting and processing mail, these consignments must be manually processed due to their non-standard shapes, dimensions or weight by its employees.
Parcel shipments are mainly sorted on fully automatic lines. The largest one, located in Bratislava, is capable of sorting up to 5,000 parcels per hour. Parcels such as tires with discs, electronics, garden tools, bicycles and quad bikes have to be sorted and processed by hand.
“Slovenská Pošta also dealt with stinking bird carcasses sent from abroad as snake food and the addressee did not collect them within the collection period,” said Iveta Dorčáková, spokesperson for Slovenská Pošta as cited by the SITA newswire.
Thousands of letters manually sorted
Slovenská Pošta has four main processing centres - Bratislava, Zvolen, Košice, Žilina, and an auxiliary processing centre in Nitra, where parcels from all over the world are sorted and processed. The busiest centre is the one in Bratislava, where up to 50 percent of all of Slovenská Pošta’s shipments are processed. On letter sorting lines, 500,000-600,000 letters are processed daily and another 600,000-700,000 letters are manually sorted.
Letter parcels may be delivered up to a weight of two kilograms and are sorted into 1st class and 2nd class consignments. Class Nr 1 consignments shall be processed on a priority basis and sorted by hand for next-day delivery. Class Nr 2 consignments are divided into consignments suitable for machine processing, sorted by an automatic sorting line with 30,000 pieces of mail per hour. Others are sorted manually.
“Customers send one another, for example, bottles, tennis rackets, shipments of live animals - bees, cockroaches, leeches or earthworms,” said Dorčáková.
