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.
Congratulations and good luck to you in your postal career. I'm glad you love it so far. Despite some personal hurdles I've had along the way, I absolutely love it most days and feel very fortunate to have this career. I don't know Powerade but I'm assuming it's an energy drink. I see Gatorade is the main competitor. The main criticism of those types of drinks is the high sugar content. My advice (with no scientific background) is to just drink 1-2 day at most and then hydrate with water. I mostly d non-sugar naturally flavored sparkling water beverages. I drink it quite a bit on hot days and it seems to help so much. I've avoided the Powerade type drinks mainly because I don't want to ingest so much sugar that could hurt my teeth and body. Moderation is my advice. Thanks for writing.
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Congratulations Mr. fulltime. That's a clever name. As far as any tips or advice I have a few. First, you are there to serve the residents or businesses on the routes, not the regular carrier who normally does the route. This means you don't have to do any favors or anything that the regular asks you to do for the customers. Please just be conscientious about delivering the mail properly and accurately. I'd recommend not going too fast just to get the route done. It's best to go at a consistent moderate pace and don't waste time on your cell phone texting and talking to people when you should be focused on working safely and efficiently. If you aren't sure about a certain delivery or maybe how to do a route, you can ask the regular carrier and hopefully they will help you. I have a route which I deliver daily, but when I have a non-scheduled day, the T6 delivers it. I give my "floater" or "comp person" the information they'd need re: houses where there are vacancies or forwards or dogs to be aware of. If the regular carrier comes in for his non-scheduled day for OT, it's possible (depending on how your office operates) you could be "bumped" off that assigned route for the day and deliver another route in the office. My advice would also be to try to stay out of any office politics if possible. Having the same route to deliver daily, I don't need to know much about what else is happening at the PO. Good luck to you, sir!
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The Facebook Link does work, but why do I only see one photo with a date stamp of 2012? As far as what we are a.lowed to do I don’t think an LLV should be parked for :45 in front of the house of a letter carrier as we only are allotted :30 for lunch and that includes any travel time. I will say that enforcement of any rules regarding this is far from uniform. Our organization is entirely inconsistent in so many ways and some supervisors don’t care what you do as long as you don’t get hurt and don’t cost them overtime unnecessarily. Others are more strict and sometimes they play favorites which I find entirely unprofessional. The bottom line as far as your question is: I don’t think it’s appropriate but I can’t say for sure that the carrier is doing something against the rules. One letter carrier in my office used to drive his delivery vehicle home for lunch as his delivery route was nearby his house. , but he never stayed for more than about :25.
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I don't know the answer to this. Most of the time we deliver all of the mail each day that is in our building unless we get backed up with volume or are short on staffing. This may not be the case in the office that delivers your mail. If there is a merchant that you want to go to with a coupon but it arrived late, you could ask the merchant to honor the offer or the business could contact the post office to inquire why their mailing was delivered late. I'm just speculating, but I would think any 3rd Class Mail (the new official term for this will be USPS Marketing Mail) should be delivered within a few days of it being received at the Post Office. Having answered many questions on jobstr, I can see that service consistency varies greatly from office to office and even among the letter carriers in that office.
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Deee, I don’t know the answer to this question. On the NALC website there is a CCA resource guide. In a section I looked at it didn’t seem to mention anything about the number of consecutive days you could be scheduled to work. We have several CCA in our office and I’m pretty sure they try to give them off one day per week, but I don’t know if it’s mandated or not. During the busy time they may work more than 7 days/week. If you have a shop steward that you could contact they may have the proper answer for you.
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This job message board isn't a customer service site to advise when mail will be delivered to a specific address. Depending on staffing and quality of the operations at your local PO will have an impact as to when your mail is delivered. In my experience mail is usually delivered between 0930 and 1800 but have heard about mail being delivered much later in some locations. If you called the USPS general customer service number i don't think they'd give you anymore of a specific answer either.
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Harris, for last couple of years the number of catalogs and magazines we deliver has decreased quite a bit so they generally aren't a pain at all. Some weekly circulars have loose ads that are oversize or fall out of the main circular and those can be messy, but in the whole scheme of things aren't too bad. Some people love to complain about anything so I'm sure if you poll my coworkers you'll get different answers. Just this past week, IKEA distributed their yearly catalog to many residents where I deliver mail. These are pretty thick, but since that day didn't have a lot of other catalogs or circulars it ran smoothly. It was a heavier than usual load due to the IKEA catalogs, but we only get them yearly and I can't think of another catalog mailers that puts out such thick catalogs in such quantities. In case you missed it, Victoria's Secret ceased mailing any catalogs earlier this year and they were a large mailer of catalogs in the past, I'm sure other catalog companies are following suit as they realize many consumers prefer to browse online. This is a great question. I feel the future for print advertising will continue to decline, but it may not be too precipitous. Another big catalog mailer is Bed, Bath, and Beyond though their ads are very thin so don't add much weight.
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