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.
I have never heard of that happening, though one resident on my postal route was concerned about the possibility of stolen identity. She was receiving misdelivered mail and was worried that maybe her mail was also being misdelivered and that the errant recipient could steal her identity. Mail is constantly delivered to the wrong house. While I like to think I make few errors, I’m not infallible. Furthermore, some coworkers care so little about delivery accuracy that they deliver wrong mail often. They are just careless and don’t verify the address on each piece of mail. It is rare in my office that we even get told about delivering the mail accurately. A customer would probably have to escalate an issue so frequently for the letter carrier to even get spoken to about it. I’ve never heard of anyone being disciplined for errant mail delivery. I’m not saying that they can’t be, but I haven’t seen it in the PO where I work Thank you for your question.
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Not really. If you are referring to FedEx or UPS, they have a very good reputation for quality work and they are profit driven so their management is under pressure to get things correct. I also think that they have better technology. The flipside to that is that they are sometimes more expensive and do not go to every address in the USA. I think USPS does a very good job in delivery but we employ too much “dead weight” and people not caring about quality work. Of course, those other companies may have the same issues, but I think their employees are on a shorter leash if they make too many errors. I am proud to work for USPS and what I do, but don’t think we are better than the major alternatives.
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I have no idea but consider myself intelligent.
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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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In the vehicle I drive, which is called an LLV (Long life vehicle), there is no radio or any kind installed. No AM/FM and no 2-way radio with the base post office or any dispatch. We use cell phones to either call or text our supervisors if necessary. Our hand held scanning devices also have the ability to text message the supervisors but I don’t think those messages are checked too frequently by the management. The phone is our best means of communication IMO.
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If an address doesn’t exist, a postal worker will write on the item “No such number” or “No Such Street” and the letter will either be discarded or returned to the sender. This depends on the class of mail. In the case of a valid address, but the item being addressed to a person who has never been at that address, the item would be marked “Attempted, Not Known” and, as in your first question, discarded or returned to the sender. In many cases, a letter carrier doesn’t know who lives at an address and they will just deliver the mail to the valid address. In that case, the current resident may or may not leave the letter in the mailbox and write on it “doesn’t live here” or something similar. Again, if that happens, the item would then either be discarded at the PO or returned to the sender.
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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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