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.
Irrelevant comment/question.
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Absolutely! I couldn’t think of doing any other job. It wasn’t always this way but I realized over the years it’s a great fit for my personality. By no means is this for everybody and many coworkers complain constantly. I have my conflicts with mgmt and the overall operation but that doesn’t take away from my love of the job. I am paid to exercise (walking about 7+ miles per day) listen to podcasts, and provide a service to our customers. I don’t have to deal a lot with office politics because I’m out of the building for about 3/4 of the work day. The pay is adequate for my lifestyle and there is a good amount of OT available to increase my income if so desired. Eventually, the USPS will be in severe financial stress so I don’t know how the changes will affect how I feel about the job, but I’m content as of now. Thanks for writing in with this question.
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This is true to a point. There are no absolutes with regard to driving in inclement weather. I drive a Grumman LLV which is what the vast majority of our motorized fleet is comprised of. Most of them were manufactured in the 1990s. All of our vehicles have heaters and fans. They may not always operate optimally but they are equipped with them. I don’t know of any LLVs that have air conditioning. We do have some new Dodge ProMasters which have AC but they can’t be used on driving routes because they are left-hand drive vehicles. If there is any decent accumulation of snow or ice on the road, the LLVs are dangerous to operate as they don’t have much road traction. I’d be worried about driving on any incline or decline in a snow or ice-covered road. Our basic mantra is that if we feel it’s unsafe to deliver the mail for any reason we can bring it back to the PO and tell a supervisor about the reason for non-delivery. Within the next few years, we likely are getting fleet replacement vehicles. I’m pretty sure they will have air bags and AC, and hopefully a back-up camera. They will hopefully be safer than the vehicles we currently drive.
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It is a bit of a lengthy process to replace the massive fleet of delivery vehicles for the USPS. From what I’ve read the testing phase of approximately 5 competing proposals is almost complete and a decision will be made later this year (2019). From that point it would probably take a few years to fully replace our fleet of LLVs. I don’t know if the current financial difficulties of the USPS would impact the timeline for this process. As far as old jeeps being used, I don’t know if some places still use it. With the volume of packages we deliver nowadays, they’d seem entirely inefficient. I haven’t seen them used in years, but I can’t speak for the entire country. At this point, they’d be well over 25 years old.
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I’ve never found any odd animal inside a mailbox. In the area I deliver, I don’t think there are snakes in the wild. The main thing we’d need to be careful about are wasps or bees and I don’t see them around he mailboxes too often.
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While his videos are entertaining, he picks and chooses the FedEx Ground events that were higher profile. I think overall they do a decent job, but the quality of people hired by these contractors can be lousy. The FedEx Express company is a different story. They are usually much more polished company employees. I think any delivery employees should be trained better on proper handling of their freight and safe driving. The USPS has some lousy employees as well.
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I am not sure about this as I’ve never encountered this situation. I would think that you would just get out of the vehicle (making sure to shut the engine when you do so as per USPS procedures), walk around to the keypad and enter the code to open the gate, return to the driver side of the vehicle, start the engine, and drive through the gate. The issue you may be thinking about is if the gate remains open long enough for the postal vehicle to drive through. I don’t know the answer to this. I deliver to a couple of gated neighborhoods on occasion, but they are usually staffed by a person or could go up automatically without a code.
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