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.
It's a very good question with a pretty easy answer. In our office, besides the regular letter carriers who deliver the same route daily, we have a group of carrier technicians (aka floaters) who deliver the mail when a carrier has a day off during the week. As much as mail is delivered Mon-Sat most carriers are only obligated to work 5 of those days. To also help fill the gap when a carrier is sick or on vacation or out for any reason a CCA (city carrier assistant) can deliver the mail. If we are very short-staffed (common in the office where I work), we deliver our own routes and then take part of the vacant route and deliver that, usually for OT pay. That is usually :30-1:00 of additional delivery time but could be longer.
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I have just copied and pasted the answer I posted from a previous q with similar wording:
I don't know the answer to this. My guess is as long as it isn't being held in customs for further inspection, then it should clear in a couple of days. When I see items from overseas that is postmarked it seems that it took 7-10 days total from when it was mailed. I'm just going on observation here and don't have any inside knowledge on what the goal is to clear international packages for delivery.
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Usually a point of delivery that has been establish (whether it be a group of cluster boxes in a trailer park or individual mailboxes at each trailer) doesn't get changed easily. I wouldn't accept a request like that to be made as that makes us less efficient and if it's done for one customer, others could claim they want it delivered to the house as well.
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It is possible that the contents of the envelope stayed in the envelope and the item will reach its destination. If the papers fall out and there is no address on them to either return the papers to you or continue on to the intended recipient, those papers would probably wind up at a "nixie" or "dead letter" area and disposed of eventually.
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Yes, we were closed in Nassau and Suffolk for Tuesday Jan 27 due to a pending snowstorm. I believe NY city POs were closed as well. I think it was a good move based on what actually fell where I deliver the mail. The roads were at least passable and most customers had shoveled their walkways to their doors and driveways. Otherwise, delivery of mail may have been extremely difficult. Now to answer your question. I don't remember a time where we were fully closed due to a snow forecast. There have been times where we have come to work and found the road conditions too difficult or unsafe to deliver the mail. I know of no database that has information about the history of when we were closed for an entire day. On Monday, I delievered apprx 80% of my possible deliveries before we were told to return to the Post Office and not report back to work until the morning of today 01/28/15. I'm not a fan of delivering in snow and ice, but we make do the best we can.
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That is interesting to hear yet not surprising to me. There are certain parcels that are supposed to have a scan on it whether or not it's actually delivered on a particular day. Amazon.com parcels are one of these types of parcels but it may occur on other parcels as well. I don't think it's right for the USPS to be doing this because it is misrepresenting the status of a parcel. In your case the fact that you live in a residence that is never closed makes it even more wrong to be scanned as "business closed". Sometimes a letter carrier may forget to deliver a parcel or it is missorted to another route and there is no time to get it correctly delivered on the same day. In this case, it might be scanned "attempted" or "business closed". In my opinion both of these scans are wrong and misleading to the recipient and/or shipper. I hope you have at least received the parcel the next delivery day. I've never been asked to scan a parcel wrongly and would refuse to do so. You may see this more lately as the volume of our parcel business for the month leading up to Christmas is probably double or more our normal parcel load.
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I don't know where you mailed the letter from, but I think mail is still processed on a holiday even if there is no delivery. I would suggest that it will arrive on Tues or Wednesday. Also, I've heard through unofficial sources that the service standards for first class mail has been delayed by a day, at least with local mail. Mail that used to take one day has started to take two days as of last week, but I haven't heard any official word or complaints about it. I don't work in an environment where I'd head too many complaints from customers nor would management tell us of too much with regards to service changes unless they absolutely had to.
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