[Opinion] Postmen

Von Herbershtine, an Austrian aristocrat who visited Russia in the early 16th century, extolled the country’s transportation system using horses. He was impressed when he found out that it took only 72 hours to get to Novgorod from Moscow, a 640km distance. He could travel as far as 213km a day by changing horses at horse stations. The stations offered food and places to sleep, as well as horses, to public officials carrying identification cards.

The transportation system was first developed by Mongolians who had to travel across vast plains. It was later introduced to not only Russia but also Yi Dynasty where the system was used as a communications means until the foundation of post office in 1884.

▷ More than a century passed since the introduction of the postal system, and we now have a new means of communication called electronic mail. Of dozens of e-mails flowing in our mailboxes everyday, however, most of them are junk mails. It’s now hard to find heart-warming letters from old friends in offline mailboxes as well. What we get instead is credit card bills, phone bills and ads from department stores and online retailers.

▷ Although people use e-mail instead of writing letters, postmen seems as busy as ever these days. In fact, the mail transactions have exponentially increased with all those credit card and mobile phone bills. As many as 6.4 billion mails were delivered last year, up more than 40% from 4.5 billion in 1997.

The number of postmen, however, has declined since the financial crisis years ago. And now being a postman becomes an increasingly challenging task. So far this year, 19 postmen died of overwork or were killed in traffic accidents, and the figure already exceeded 18 last year. Some even suggest that post offices use home delivery services to ease burden.

▷ The postal agency must have reduced its workforce believing the volume of mail transactions will decrease. But their prediction turned out wrong. The volume is increasing. Then does this mean the modern society is getting similar with the nomadic age? It might be time to reinforce the postal system, a modern-day version of the Mongolian invention.

But it seems not that easy to beef up the workforce. Although the Ministry of Information and Communication belatedly asks for the reinforcement, the Ministry of Planning and Budget, the agency in charge of budge allocations, is seeing the plan contradicting the ‘small government’ policy. No one will object a plan to cut down the number of high-ranking government officials, since it is postmen what our society needs.

Park Young-kyun, Editorial Writer, parkyk@donga.com