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 would deliver his mail as I would anybody else. Being the President, I’m sure the White House has their own procedure for receiving mail as it must get thousands of pieces of mail daily and has its own ZIP code.
That is a very timely question. I have a lot of faith in the Postal Service able to handle the volume of absentee ballot applications as well as completed ballots. Due to the coronavirus pandemic I believe it is much safer for people who prefer to vote by mail be given an equal opportunity as those who want to physically go to a polling site. In June, 2020, the area where I work had 2 elections. One was a Democratic Party primary. The other was a school budget vote. Both seemed to go smoothly with respect to sending out and retrieving and processing election mail. Several states have been conducting VBM elections for years and I don’t believe there are any major issues that have arisen with respect to voter fraud or ballots being counted.
I’m not sure why some people use a personal vehicle. Usually those are rural letter carriers who are compensated for using their own vehicle and have an amber light to warn you that it’s a slow moving vehicle and will make frequent stops. When I was first hired we sometimes have to use our own vehicle and could get some type of reimbursement for it. There was one regular carrier who would use his own vehicle each day because he preferred to. I don’t have a choice I have to use an LLV which is fine as I would prefer not to use my own vehicle and I do not have the capacity either to handle the parcel load. On some city routes, a carrier may use their own vehicle to get themselves from the office to their route. A parcel post carrier brings their relays of mail to boxes along the route. This would happen in offices where there are not a sufficient quantity of vehicles for each carrier. Our office has one vehicle available per route and a couple of spares.
On the postal route, not particularly. I’m pretty easy going. I don’t really care when people just talk to you because you aren’t just a body. I mean they aren’t conversant and just want to talk about their accomplishments around the house, etc. Truthfully, it’s a waste of my time so I can tolerate it in small doses. If they get too long winded, I walk away and don’t give an excuse. I realize that wasn’t your question Rarely do I ever get complaints about my delivery or the time I arrive. The latter is out of my control. Mail is quite unimportant these days so many people don’t care when, or even, if they get a delivery. I can’t think of any stupid complaints. Every now and then there is a complaint or comment about mail being wet due to sweat on my arm. I don’t find that an unreasonable complaint, so for that customer, I try to keep her mail dry.
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Thanks for the heads up, Jessica. Trolls are the bain of the Internet.
I don’t know for sure what would happen if a letter carrier was caught stealing or snooping through someone’s mail. If the postal inspectors are involved, they could have the employee arrested and then have a prosecutor charge them with a crime. To me, this is the same as discarding mail that you don’t want to deliver. I would like to think that most of the time, the letter carrier would be fired from the USPS, but our union often fights a termination and the employee may keep their job. I do wish we were more punitive when a postal employee tampers with the mail at all, but they sometimes just get warnings and are back on the job.
Your letter carrier doesn’t generally have access to your new address if you have filled out a forwarding order (change of address request) via www.usps.com. If you were to manually fill out a paper COA request, it’s possible the letter carrier may get a copy of it. I sometimes get a list of the current forwarding orders on file for my route. The list does have the new address for anybody who moved in the last year and submitted a forwarding order. That information is confidential and should never be released to anybody except via official summons or other legal matter. I would be confident that your letter carrier would keep that information private. Most of the time they don’t even have access to that information.
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