Postman Pat and his black and white cat

From years 5-6 to the adulthood (biological, anyway :p) I used to live in a small village. We had one post office in the village, and one mailman (-woman), who delivered all kinds of mail to everyone. In the corner of the village that our house was located along with 10-ish other similar houses, there were sets of mailboxes located in one spot in the middle and everyone had to go there to get their daily newspaper and magazines.

When I moved to Tallinn and lived in several apartment houses (at least four) (and a dorm, which I don't have very fond memories of), the mail system was the same everywhere - there's a bunch of mailboxes downstairs at the front door for each apartment, where all the mail gets delivered to. So you could pick up your mail when you came from school/work/walk/wherever/feeding ducks in winter, or if you stayed in, you had to go down and pick it up.

When I moved to Helsinki I soon discovered there are no mailboxes at all. There are holes in the doors, where the mailman pushes the mail into, and then it falls on your hallway floor. Convenient, eh. It was funny at first, as this procedure takes place with kind of a loud "clonk" and I used to get startled and thought someone is trying to break in :p Mailmen and -women have to work more here to deliver mail to everyone separately, but I bet they have much less area/population to cover than mailpersons in Estonia, who have like a whole village or half of the town (semi-figuratively speaking).

But that's not all. It seems like different people are delivering different mail-related items here as well. Our first paper, Hufvudstadsbladet ("The Capital City Newspaper" in rough translation) that Jan-Erik reads comes at night (!). I have woken up accidentally 3-4 am and heard the paper being "clonked" through the door. Poor mailpeople! Hufvudstadsbladet is Finland's biggest Swedish-language paper.


The next batch arrives some time in the afternoon, from midday to 2-3 pm. That includes Kauppalehti ("Trade Newspaper"), which is in Finnish and comes for free thanks to some shenanigans, no doubt, which I occasionally browse, but it's not that interesting so I don't dedicatedly read it. This mailperson also brings letters and magazines (gaming magazine Pelit once a month and Disney comic book Aku Ankka once a week for me because it's good for my Finnish practice :p No-one shall know I actually like Donald and Daisy Duck!), and DVDs and other stuff that fits through the mail hole. Bigger stuff goes to the mail centre.


And then ther's some mailpeople who bring advertisements and such pointless fire material about 5 pm or so. That has happened lately because we took away the ugly "No advertisements, please" sign from our door in order to replace it with a nicer one, and meanwhile, since it's not there... There are also nice DHL-people, who occasionally deliver cat-related stuff ordered from Germany, and they come in the morning-ish too.

When I was little, I wanted to become a mail deliverer. Then later I wanted to become a journalist. But after having chief edited the school newspaper for a few years, I buried this thought. Way too much pressure for way too little reward (and I'm not talking about financial reward here) :p Right now I do work with newspapers and magazines, though, in more of an observant kind of way, and that's pretty fine with me.