MailmanDave
17 Years Experience
Long Island, NY
Male, 43
I am a City Letter Carrier for the US Postal Service in NY. I've been a city letter carrier for over 17 years and it is the best job I've ever had. I mostly work 5 days per week (sometimes includes a Saturday) and often have the opportunity for overtime, which is usually voluntary. The route I deliver has about 350 homes and I walk to each of their doors to deliver the mail. Please keep in mind that I don't have authority to speak for the USPS, so all opinions are solely mine, not my employer.
Congratulations on being hired as a CCA. I wear black shoes that have the SR/USA tag required by the USPS. These can be purchased using your uniform allowance which you may not receive for several months after being hired and passing probation. The brands I use are New Balance and Rocky. I've never had a problem with their comfort, just that I usually have to replace them every 6 months or so due to the amount of walking I do daily. If you don't have a uniform allowance I'd say to wear whatever is comfortable to you like an athletic shoe. Don't wear anything fancy because it will inevitably get dirty in no time.
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It's possible that either things happened. It may depend on where you live, but actually having things from mailboxes where I work is quite rare. As far as a letter carrier taking it out of the mailbox, I can't really say. Some letter carriers are strict and say nothing can be in the mailbox except US Mail. If they take it out I'm not sure what they'd be doing with it. I am not really sure how you'd find out. I doubt the PO would be of much help. As much as I don't like things left in mailboxes that aren't US mail, if I can clearly see it's not outgoing mail, I'll usually just leave it and put the mail in the box. I have to stress that I can predict the actions of other letter carriers. I've seen too many who don't care and can be vindictive toward customer which I don't understand.
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I don't know that it matters where the plates are from if someone is delivering your mail, but I'm by no means criticizing your question. Do you know if you live on a Rural Delivery route? If so, those carriers sometimes use a POV (privately owned vehicle) to deliver the mail. In the office where I work, the rural carriers used to use POVs but now they use the USPS-owned Long-Life vehicles, aka LLVs. The USPS sometimes leases vehicles if there is a shortage of company vehicles available. If you live on a rural route, it may be delivered by a Rural Carrier Associate (RCA) who may have their own vehicle for delivery. There are several variables as to why your mail is being delivered by a MA-plated Red Minivan but I can't say for sure.
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Dee, that just happened to me today. I was given part of another route to deliver, but along with the mail on the other route which I was suposed to deliver was additional mail that wasn't part of my extra assignment. Not knowing if I was approved to deliver that additional mail, I called the delivery supervisor at the Post Office and asked for further guidance. She said to go ahead and deliver it and that wouldn't be an issue with me taking longer than I was supposed to. Basically, just call the post office and ask for the delivery supervisor. When they send you out to deliver mail, your supervisor should give you the office phone number to call if there are any questions. It's pretty common for me to call the PO and vice versa if we have questions. I would hope your supervisors are just as receptive as it is part of their job to assist you with anything you may not be sure of. I also have the cell #'s of some of my co-workers who I'll call/text if I have a question they might know the answer to.
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To be honest Henry, I don't know what happens when you drop a UPS package off in a USPS collection box by mistake. The logical thing would be for us to hand it off to UPS somehow. UPS drop boxes and drivers are pretty easy to find in NYC. You say there is no UPS tracking information that's been updated. Like you said, I doubt it will be turning up anywhere but I don't know what would happen to it unless it's sitting on some pile of errantly mailed items at a mail sorting facility. Nothing surprises me at the USPS when it comes to missing items. I hate to be a pessimist but I hear enough stories of us errantly delivering mail or packages and then who knows what the recipient does with it, if anything. I try to be very accurate and diligent with my deliveries as do most of my co-workers but it just takes a few screw-ups to ruin the journey of a package or letter which was properly mailed. I know I got off on a tangent here. Maybe you could wait another week before considering it lost or call the USPS customer service phone number. I'm not sure how much help they can be in this situation.
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It probably depends on the office where you work as to what time you start delivering your route. Where I work most deliveries probably start between 9:15 and 10:30 AM. It depends how long the letter carriers take to prepare their routes in the AM for delivery. Some routes get more mail than others or take longer to prepare in order for delivery. Also, some letter carriers are faster than others at starting their routes. I usually start delivery by 10AM and am finished around 4PM if the weather and volume of mail and parcels isn't out of line with what I normally get. Most of the letter carriers where I work start their tour at 7:30 AM.
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In theory each postal route (which is usually made up of one letter carrier) should be the amount of work (sorting and delivering the mail/parcels) for 8 hrs of work per day. In reality this amt varies depending on the time of year (December being the heaviest package season so it usually takes longer to complete a route, summer not so much). There aren't adjustments made too frequently to the size of a postal route but it could happen if a route was way out of whack to being able to be finished in 8 hours. There is a route adjustment procedure that takes place where the volume of mail is counted plus the amount of time it takes to deliver a route. To answer your question though, I don't know of an actually limit in the amt of mail to be given each day to a letter carrier.
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