From broken jaws to bribing dogs with treats, there’s not much Glenn Turner hasn’t seen in his 50 years of working for Australia Post.
Mr Turner started working with the postal service in Shepparton when he was 18 years old, on June 10, 1974.
Though his is one of the friendly faces you’ll see these days behind the counter at the Wyndham St outlet, he’s held many varied positions.
“When I started, I was a telegram boy,” Mr Turner said.
“We had SPC who used to send telegrams out to all the women and men to start work at the cannery and we just delivered all day on our bikes to let them know they were starting work.”
After he’d finished his stint as a telegram boy, Mr Turner transitioned to postie.
Back in those days, there were no electric bikes, they were all pedal-powered.
Mr Turner said doing his 15-mile (more than 24km) round in the rain, hail or sunshine, five days a week, kept him fit as he was out on his bike for three to four hours each day.
He recalled being chased and bitten by a few dogs, learning quickly that dog treats were a handy addition to a postman’s toolkit.
“On one round, I had a big white, fluffy dog come up to me,” the father-of-two and stepfather-of-three said.
“One day I asked him ‘What’s the matter?’ and I gave him a biscuit.
“After that he followed me around like a little protector, so if any other dogs came after me he went for them.”
After spending more than five years cycling, Mr Turner took up a position at the Seymour Mail Centre for another five, before heading back to Shepparton to become a van driver delivering larger articles of mail.
But when the opportunity to become a clerk inside the safety of the canine-free store in Shepparton arose, he took it.
He has enjoyed working in several surrounding towns’ post offices, providing relief when their permanent staff were on leave for holidays or illness.
“The relief work was really good because I went to other post offices, I met the staff there and a lot of people around the area,” Mr Turner said.
He said the people were his favourite part of the job, so meeting new ones — staff and customers — in other towns made him happy.
“I remember once, when I was working in Tat, my aunty came in and she said ‘What are you doing here?’,” Mr Turner said.
“I said ‘There’s a lady here giving people a hard time, so they brought in an expert.’”
While he might have just been winding his aunty up, jokingly suggesting she was hassling staff, Mr Turner was once, unfortunately, given quite a hard time of his own when he was violently assaulted in the laneway at the rear of the outlet in Shepparton.
“One of the girls, a van driver, came in and said there was a guy out there giving her a hard time and she was really scared,” Mr Turner said.
“I went out there and he punched me and I found out a couple of days later when the doctor said he was sending me to Melbourne that my jaw was broken.”
Mr Turner spent four days in hospital in Melbourne before surgeons operated.
As far as the significant changes that have taken place across five decades, Mr Turner said the advancement of technology and the introduction of computers had been the biggest learning curve.
“We didn’t have computers when I started,” he said.
“They came in later on, so we had to get used to doing everything on them.”
And how about those stamp price hikes?
“I think a postage stamp was about 20 or 25 cents at the time (in 1974),” Mr Turner said.
“Now it’s up to a dollar-fifty.”
With Australia Post regularly adding further services, the learning curve never flattens.
Staff have to be multi-skilled, with experience in banking, bill-paying, passport applications and retail sales, to name a few, but Mr Turner said the job was a good one.
“If you really want to learn, there’s a lot of opportunities when you work for Australia Post,” he said.
“You can become a sorter, a driver, work on the counters, lots of things.”
Mr Turner plans on seeing out his working days at Australia Post, but once he’s retired you’ll probably find him hanging out with his three grandkids, or old-school camping in a tent by the river in the warmer months, as those are his favourite things to do when he’s not working.
Mr Turner was to be presented with a plaque recognising his 50 years of service by Australia Post executive general manager Josh Bannister during a roadshow on Monday, May 13.
There will be a morning tea held for him at work on Friday, June 7, while current and returning staff will show up to celebrate the epic milestone with him at a dinner at The Aussie that night.