Got my parcel from Temu today. That’s right, trade opportunities with China are in vogue at the moment, just ask Albo.

Australia Post told me I could expect it yesterday or today, and sure enough there it was.

Mind you, they hadn’t set the bar too high. The order I placed on June 24 had cleared customs in Brisbane three days later and since then had been going up and down the Bruce Highway like a… (well you get the idea!).

Perhaps I should have got the hint from its first stop, in the unfortunately-named Bungle-Oh!! No sorry, that’s Bungalow 4870, just outside the centre of Cairns, where it arrived a week later.

No worries, having been “incorrectly sorted”, it has been “forwarded to correct location”…if that’s how you’d describe Redbank in suburban Brisbane, where Australia Post has been building a “cutting edge $50 million parcel facility” able to “process” 176,000 parcels per day for the past year.

She’ll be right then: After years of writing about the bleeding-edge technology used by newspapers in their mailrooms, I’m impressed. Post Group chief Paul Graham says the new facility will reduce touchpoints and manual handling. Complementing their “modernisation and regional capacity network programme, with 39 network operations sites upgraded in the past 12 months”… I can be sure my little Temu package will have made up for lost time, speeding to its destination then. Right?

Wrong.

Firstly, the new Five-Star Green Star accredited centre won’t be in operation until 2026, although they have opened one in Melbourne, following an installation in Sydney in 2023.

And there’s another reason. A further week later – on July 15 – my parcel is being “forwarded to correct location” again… this time from Maryborough (the Queensland one) which is also north of my post box in Cooran in the Noosa hinterland.

Or more precisely, back to Redbank, where apparently it arrived on July 16.

Pragmatically, the Chinese ecommerce retailer has already credited me with $5.00, delivery having not taken place by the promised July 10.

Normally, we’re reconciled to the fact that it takes more than a day to transport even the meanest postal package from the metropolis to the northern Sunshine Coast. Which incidentally, is something News Corp does all the time, printing the Courier-Mail and The Australian in Yandina and somehow managing to deliver copies to newsagents all over the region within hours.

But I digress. Just to say I was so gobsmacked by the news that the parcel had arrived at 10.01 am the following day that I didn’t get to collect it from the post office until the afternoon.

Where a young woman advised that they hadn’t put a card in our box “because it (correctly) had both our street and PO addresses on it”. Or whatever. There’s always a catch… so here’s a couple of mine. Just what I ordered.