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.
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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I'm sorry but it's unlikely that you would be able to get your paycheck before regular mail delivery on Monday. It is likely that your post office closed and may not have anybody there until early on Monday AM. Even on Monday AM, it's not likely that your mail will be available (or that you'd find anybody willing or allowed to help). I don't know where your post office is so I can't speak to the specifics of your situation. I am just speaking in generalities of what I think would be the situation at most post offices. My question to you is: How do you know your pay check is at the post office? Most post offices deliver whatever mail has arrived on the same day that it arrives. What I mean is that mail that is processed overnight at a regional sorting facility arrives at our local post office by apprx 730AM and then is all sent out for delivery the same day it arrives. Do you have a PO Box where the paycheck would be and your local post office has restricted hours for access (i.e. not a 24 hour lobby).
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Regarding your question Joseph, I don't known what the official rule is on this. If I were the letter carrier who was collecting the mail from the blue collection box and you approached me with appropriate ID and the letter was easy to find, I'd return it to you. I can imagine some other carriers not being as accommodating to your request either because they don't want to help you or because we may not technically be allowed to. It's also not always so easy to find the person collecting the mail unless you are watching the mailbox for awhile because letter carrier doesn't always come at the time printed on the collection box schedule label. The time printed on the label is the earliest time of the collection but it could be hours before the mail is actually collected.
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I don't deliver my own mail because I reside in Queens, NY and Stony Brook, NY but don't work at either of those post offices. If a letter carrier does reside in the town that they work in, it is possible that they deliver their own mail. We have a few carriers at my PO that live and work in this town, but none of them have assignments that include their own residence on a daily basis.
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If you live on a college campus, they probably already have established a standard method of delivery to the dormitories. They probably don't deliver it to your room. It is likely that the dormitory has central delivery boxes in the lobby area or in a mailroom. Other campuses might have all the student mail come to a central mailroom or student center which has individual mailboxes for each student. You can contact the student life office or office of residential life for more information. Thank you for writing.
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The letter will possibly just go through the mail processing system again and be sent back to you. I don't think anybody would notice that it was sent a second time and your letter carrier would hopefully just deliver it again to you. It would likely go back to the sender if somewhere on the envelope was written "person doesn't live here" or "return to sender" but that isn't the case here. Hopefully you will get the letter back in a couple of days.
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Sorry to say that we can't guarantee arrival of a birthday card on a specific date when mailed via regular class mail. We do, however, have a decent record of getting most letters delivered the next day when mailed from the same city, and 2-3 days when mailed from further away. To play it safe I'd mail the card 2 days in advance and, if you prefer, you can write "Do Not Open Until Your Birthday" on the outside of it. You are a thoughtful friend. Good Luck!
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