Australia Post

As a tourist spot, worth ten minutes of your time. Great exterior, historic building. Great interior (not the post office part) but if you look up at the ceiling you see the grandeur of a bygone era.
This building is part of a big renovation coming soon, so how much of it will survive intact is unclear to me. It is a worthy photo stop on any tourist trip through Adealide. It only takes five minutes of your time, and it is FREE to enter.
Adelaide’s big charm is the amazing number of buildings from the 19^th and early 20^th Century whose facades are unchanged. That was really striking on a recent tourist trip.
And if you collect coins, the GPO sells commemoratives, proof sets, etc.

Mmmmm… I appear to have got caught up in some type of time-​shift…
Wait a moment… I’ve got it… I’m in a government building in East Berlin in about 1970.
Seriously, that’s the vibe here. Kafka would feel right at home, zero customer service ethic, the staff were not actually rude, but it was clear that customers are untermensch, at best to be treated with polite contempt.
Bureaucracy doesn’t have to be like this. Contrast the experience with ServiceSA on North Terr — helpful, efficient even when run off their feet.
It’s a shame, but if this is the face of AusPost then it deserves to fail. I can’t imagine anything inducing me to return.
Nice building though.

16÷1÷2012 Photos
Seriously, it’s just a post office. I mean, what else would I expect from such a place, knowing that I’ve been to my local suburban post office a thousand times before.
An extra star for the directions given to me by one of the building employees inside (yes I went right, not left). Once you do find it (when you enter through the door, you have to make a sharp LEFT into that dark corridor and keep going straight to the bright yellow light), you will be faced with waiting at the back of a long line, even on a Monday morning. I shouldn’t be complaining, because it could’ve been a whole lot longer, but hey, I don’t like waiting okay.
I was only here to mail an A4 envelope to Victoria, and then I got a lot of stuff to do after this. This line sucks. But surprisingly, it was only around 10 minutes before I got served…
So I do appreciate the speed of the customer service reps sitting behind the counter. It was so damn quiet in here, I was waiting for someone to explode, fart, or go off at the customer service rep, or something to kill the silence lol jk… Another star to the guy who served me, for pointing out where my A4 envelope was being sold (it’s on the wall to your right).
Anyway, this is the biggest post office in the Adelaide CBD. You know where it is now. It is a fair walk from Rundle Mall, and the hot summer heat won’t help, but hey, we gotta do what we gotta do to pay our bills.

What a curious place is Adelaide with all its history carved in stone. It is a beautiful place in so many ways, and a savage place in others. A dreadful heat pounding on the land so much of the time, and in the cold weather it is truly a cold place.
Much of the stone used to build Adelaide buildings was quarried from the local region. The masonry work done on buildings such as Adelaide’s rather large General Post Office is quite fine when you get up close, and the historic interiors are very beautiful with a lot of amazing wood work along with the grand design.
Sometimes the actual service can seem just as brutal as the weather when you hear the way non mainstream people are handled, but if you turn a blind eye you can get way with believing this whole city is a beautiful place filled with beautiful people. I say this after hearing an Australia Post worker be so incredibly rude to an Indian customer I thought for a moment I was on Candid Camera; I’m not even going to repeat what she said to the woman it is so rude, but I will say this — these people are so complacent and secure in their job positions they think they rule the world.
At the Adelaide GPO I have stood and requested to speak with the manager on duty because I’ve been mocked by a service provider at the counter. I was handed seventy cents worth of five cent coins once in change, and I requested I be given my change with less coin; the woman behind the counter rolled her eyes at me and huffed and puffed because this meant she had to get some other change for her change drawer.
Given her display of ridicule towards me I asked if I may speak to the supervisor or manager on duty; which solicited more eye rolling and puffing and huffing, «Oh you’ll have to wait,» says she. «That’s okay,» says I, «I will wait.»
After about nine minutes a woman came out from the back asking, «What’s your problem?» Her attitude was clear — I was the bad guy — there was no doubt she had me pegged as some kind of trouble maker. «I’m not happy with the counter service,» I said. «What do you expect me to do about it?» says she. «I’m only coming back here if you guarantee I’ll be treated with civility and respect; otherwise I’ll be writing a long letter to my local MP,» I said. «Right,» she says, «that’s fair enough,» I smiled, «Good, we’ll leave it at that then» and I left.
Don’t let them get away with it say I. If they are rude be quite clear that you want to speak to someone about their rudeness. It is such a beautiful building, it would be a great tragedy if people stopped coming in to it because the staff were so incredibly rude.

Standing proudly on the corner of King William and Franklin Streets sits the Adelaide GPO Building and this is another of Adelaide’s significant buildings designed by Edmund Wright along with Edward John Woods. Of course today it’s the Adelaide head office for Australia Post and inside you can do all the normal post office things like post your letters and parcels, pay bills or organise a passport.
Where the GPO now stands has actually been the site of the Adelaide post office since 1851 even though the current building wasn’t actually built until the years between 1867 and 1872. It took over 20 years before the clock and bells were installed. There were four bells installed to chime and one to strike on the hour. These are the bells you still hear today when they chime every quarter hour. In 1892 the building was extended to accommodate the recently added telephone exchange and by 1894 a new switchboard was installed.
It’s incredible to think how technology has changed since the days of the first post office and I have to admit, in this age of electronic and social media I enjoy going into the post office to post some old fashioned snail mail. There’s something quaint about it in this day and age and I’d really like to think that a building like this hasn’t lost its significance or relevance.