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'm glad you like this blog. It's my pleasure to help where I can and I have a great appreciation for those who do podcasts or other websites just for fun. Their time commitments are impressive given the work it takes to maintain a blog or a website. Since I have no experience with the CCA hiring process, I can't give you any hard facts about how long the process takes. Congratulations on getting an interview. There will likely be a drug test and medical exam if you haven't gone through that process already. I imagine it would only be 1-2 months after that to be notified if you will be hired. There are about 6 CCAs in the office where I work but there is a solid turnover among them. It's not the job for everyone. It's physically demanding, pay for CCAs isn't great ($16.50/hr Apprx) and you aren't always treated that well. I still recommend it if you get hired because long-term it has proven to be a great career for me. I wish you well and have a positive attitude.
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Kris, that is a very good question that I don't have the answer to. I follow a general rule that somebody has paid to have mail sent and delivered so there isn't any way for us to pick and choose what type of mail to deliver. It all gets delivered and I rarely if ever have anyone refuse the ads or other unwanted mail. I would just ask that you recycle the unwanted mail. I am very glad that none of the patrons I deliver to refuse some mail, as our job is to provide a paid service to the mailers. I do agree that much of what is delivered often is of no interest to the recipient (including mail that I receive), but I just recycle it. Thanks for writing.
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I don't know about the legality of keeping the package when it has already been scanned "delivered", but it certainly is bad as far as data integrity goes. The letter carrier may have scanned many of their parcels "delivered" earlier on in the day which is completely wrong (I can't say illegal) so they don't forget later on. Your example is a great reason why we aren't supposed to scan an item as "delivered" until we actually deliver it. Now if you approached him/her and asked about it, they should then give you the package. If this happened to you more than once I would speak to a delivery supervisor about this because it is very much against our rules to scan a package "delivered" when it wasn't. It is also misrepresenting the shipping status to our customers on both the sending and receiving end. It is also strange that the package has a 9:25 PM delivery time. I can't say it's impossible but I've rarely heard of the USPS out on a Saturday night delivering parcels.
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I have to tell you that I don't know what recourse you have in this situation since the woman who says she doesn't have it probably can't be held accountable for actually having it. How does the super know it went to the wrong address? I'm just curious since I'm not sure how this whole chain of events can be verified. I'm sorry that I can't help you further and it is very difficult to get an item back that is misdelivered if the actual recipient doesn't admit to having it. Even if you called a local post office to file some type of complaint about this, I don't know what help they would be.
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Hello Jake. I don't think the mail truck should have driven away from you if they actually had the package. Do you know if the mail truck actually had the package for you to be delivered? The only reason that the mail truck should have just driven away is if it somehow felt that it was dangerous to deliver the package to your house. I don't think that throwing a baseball around is reason enough not to attempt to deliver a package.
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You bad bad person Aila! Seeing that you were just 6 years old and you returned it all, there are worse crimes you could have committed. I am glad you know by now not to touch any mail or mailboxes that aren't yours. It is horrible to think of mail being taken out of mailboxes illegally. I consider it sacred, even if, in all honesty, it's not so important to a lot of people today and has been replaced a lot by technology. With regard to how it works for mailmen, I'm not sure what you mean. I have never been involved with a mail theft incident during my career. If I did I would likely tell my supervisor about it and follow their directives. Thanks for writing And stay away from those mailboxes ;-)
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David, you are correct about parcel delivery becoming ubiquitous. When I started at the USPS in 1998, there was so much actual mail to be sorted and delivered with only a few parcels. The pendulum is definitely swinging the other way and I truly can envision a time where mail becomes very insignificant compared to parcel delivery. Right now, we seem to have a fair amount of both. In developments that have cluster delivery boxes (usually apartment buildings or condominium complexes) or in a PO lobby we do use parcel lockers. I don't know how it would work with having boxes on the street similar to the USPS collection boxes used today. Currently the parcel lockers work this way---If a customer has a package to large to fit in their regular delivery receptacle, the carrier will put the package in the parcel locker, lock it with a key they have and put a separate specific parcel locker key in the regular receptacle of the parcel recipient. When the postal customer goes to retrieve their mail, they will see the parcel locker key and use that key in a specified parcel locker. Once they insert the key and turn it, that key stays in the lock, the locker opens and the customer retrieves their parcel. It is a very efficient system as opposed to going to the door of a customer (in a centralized delivery environment) to just use the parcel lockers.
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