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'd recommend taking it to the Post Office to make sure you are paying the right amt. You should just be able to put it in a letter size envelope (if it fits) and seal the envelope well. A proper address should also be written on the envelope where the bottom line is the Country of Destination (in your case either UK or Scotland). My quick search says that a 2 oz. letter to Scotland would be $2.21. If you are interested, you can go to www.usps.com and search for calculate a price and after answering several questions you can get a rate. 2 stamps would be equal to .98 so that would be insufficient to mail to Scotland. The minimum price for international mailing is $1.20 I think. Thanks for writing and I always say it's better to put too much postage on instead of too little. This way you lessen the risk of an item being returned for insufficient postage.
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I don't think being a letter carrier is dangerous with respect to personal safety. I think most people respect the letter carrier enough not to assault or harass them. I can be accused of looking at this situation through rose-colored glasses because I am a male and deliver mail in an affluent area where very little violent crime occurs. You need to be vigilant for loose dogs and to drive carefully. The only protection we have for an emergency is for a dog attack. In that case we have dog repellent spray plus a mail satchel which could be used as sort of a shield between you and the dog. Most workplace injuries are falls which results in cuts, sprains, bruises and broken bones. In case of a real emergency we would call 911 and alert the Post Office.
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I actually have no idea regarding the blue collection boxes being replaced with ones that have thinner slots. Possibly it is harder to steal out of it with a thinner slot buy I'm purely speculating. I don't know that theft from these boxes is much of an issue in most areas. Your question is the first I'm hearing about different size slot collection boxes. If anything I just hear of there being less collection boxes in general due to the decline in First-Class Mail being sent.
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If you know their name and what PO they work at you could mail it with their name, c/o the PO where they work and hopefully they will get it. You could mark it Personal if you want to. I have lost a lot of faith lately in things getting delivered to where they should but you could try it. I would think if our supervisor or PM saw a letter addresses to an employee they'd give it to them as long as it wasn't habitual. iVe never been in that situation so I can't say for sure. Thanks for your question.
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Kim, that is generally what would happen if you came up to my postal vehicle to hand me outgoing letters. I have a small square tray which is raised on 4 sides where I put the outgoing letters and bring back to the post office for dispatch. Some use a bin or a larger tray depending on the outgoing mail volume. So in a word, nothing to worry about it and good question.
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Maybe for a day or so to see if anybody in the PO knows where that address is. Being that I deliver mail to the same neighborhood each day I know if a piece of mail has a valid address on it or not. It's possible if there is a replacement letter carrier delivering mail on a certain day and they can't find an address they will bring back the mail and then possibly the regular letter carrier on the route or somebody else would know where the address is. More often than not when mail has an address that can't be found (or the address doesn't even exist), we will endorse the mail as "NSN" which means "No Such Number" and it will be returned to the sender. The USPS has a national database of all valid addresses so we usually know at the PO if an address exists or not.
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I generally wouldn't do that unless I knew the neighbors were friends with each other and could be trusted to give the package to the correct recipient. I've never been in this situation since I can leave packages at a customers house without someone home to receive it. I don't know technically what we are allowed to do without your permission but we are trusted to protect the US mail and deliver it safely to the correct address.
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