Source: Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand
Santa’s elves may be busy making goodies around the world, but it’s New Zealand’s truckies that are a key link in getting them out where they belong in time for Christmas.
A case in point is Deb O’Brien and her happy team of 14 at Debz Transport in the Hutt Valley.
She looks after the deliveries from Temu, Shein, Booktopia, and a whole range of goods coming through Wellington Airport.
Christmas comes after the onslaught of Black Friday and Cyber Monday so it’s a big month of scanning thousands and thousands of items ordered by keen Kiwi shoppers.
The parcels come off the planes in large air containers, sometimes three at a time, with up to a thousand items in each one. These go to a secure site in Lyall Bay where every package is scanned by hand.
Deb says if a parcel scans green and goes “beep”, it’s good to go, but if they’re come up red, the scanning app “makes a hell of a racket”. Those parcels are put aside for checking by New Zealand Customs Service.
And then it’s the turn of NZ Couriers or Aramex to get involved, with each driver collecting the parcels, sorting them into bins and scanning everything again.
It’s nothing if not thorough. And Deb’s gotten pretty good at it, as all her team are.
“I can scan an air container of a thousand items in an hour and a quarter,” she says.
The only problem for her is that when she’s getting down to the bottom of the air container, she’s on her hands and knees. She’s built more like a centre than a goal shoot, but it’s still a bit of work to empty them out.
“I’ve got to watch myself because I’ve banged my head a couple of times!”
A former board member of Transporting New Zealand, and current member of the General Freight Sector Group, Deb is also going all out for her staff and other truckies they deal with this year.
The usual day at Debz is from 5am till 6pm and somehow she’s made time to make massive amounts of rocky road sweets for the Christmas goodie bag everyone gets. There’s also Christmas pudding, and a ham.
The 250 hand-made Christmas cards for customers and clients are just another way to make sure she hasn’t got a spare hour of the day left. But it will be a Merry Christmas for all!
