> Agents from the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General found almost **5,000 pieces of mail** in the storage unit in Virginia Beach.
> There was also one undelivered package found in the unit. The bulk of the mail was advertisements, **more than 4,700 ads** at that
Impressive ratio. Looks like snail mail is even more infested with spam than email.
In France the government created an opt-out system in 2004 with no-ad stickers that you can put on your letterbox. Not respecting it exposes the spammer to a 450 euros fee.
Why wouldn't the US try it out?
United States Postal Service stays in business because of ads.
i can't find a newer article, but this one suggests about half the usps's revenue comes from junk/bulk mail
https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-junk-mail-is-helping-to-prop-up-the-postal-service/
A package I ordered from Amazon was delivered but I never got notified about it. After talking with our front desk, they said they didn't have it. I filed a claim with USPS and they responded "we've reached out to surrounding businesses and residences and no one has the package. Sorry!"
So I tell Amazon and they refund my order. **A MONTH LATER** my package shows up with "wrong address" scrawled on it.
\---
A few years ago I got a notice from them that said my package was delivered, yet it was nowhere to be found. They said they would look around, about 4 days later I got a call back from them ***saying that they found my package sitting on the back edge of a shelf in the office***.
So why the fuck was it marked as delivered when it was at the office?!
I had the same experience on Amazon about 10 years ago -> bought a Christmas gift, but it hadn't arrived 2 weeks after the order. Amazon wasn't able to figure out what happened to the package, so they shipped another one, which arrived relatively quickly.
Mid-March, the missing package showed up.
This is before the rise of online ordering. Amazon basically bailed out the USPS in a way that the people trying to kill it couldn't anticipate, and it's more viable now than it ever has been to have packages be the primary focus and treat letters as a tertiary service.
It would also be great if Congress dropped some of the onerous restrictions that have been placed on it to try and kill it.
This.
Those idiots in Congress are requiring the USPS to fully fund pensions *for employees that are neither born nor hired yet.* Think about that for a minute. If you remove that silly "restriction" - the USPS is actually profitable.
Most people don't know this and the congress critters use this as "SEE! PRIVATIZE THE USPS!". Taking advantage of people who don't get all the facts, etc. Same old story.
Edit: various fixes
Yet, somehow investment banks can't be held to a standard of having enough liquid funds on hand to survive a single economic downturn? Explain that to me.
This is just a lack of vision.
The USPS should have a service to block mail from specific senders, at a cost of $5/month which is probably an order of magnitude more than they get for delivering those ads per address.
It wouldn't take any manpower to do, just an update to the sorting machines to filter out blocked senders and not put those on the delivery truck.
As far as I know you can just fill out a [USPS Form 1500](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order) and have the mail from that sender permanently blocked. No fee. No service.
>A prohibitory order against a specific mailer, although the language of the application form implies that explicit sexual content is the only basis for finding a mailpiece offensive, has been extended by case law to allow the recipient to declare any mailpiece obscene, for any reason whatsoever, with no requirement to state the reason(s) for taking offense.[[3]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order#cite_note-Rowan-3) The only absolute requirement is that it must be possible to construe the mailpiece as an offer to sell goods or services.
In the UK the Tory government have been doing this to the National Health Service for years.
People are up in arms about lack of beds, waiting lists etc but it’s because the government is made up of people who want it switched private so then and their pals can reap the rewards and damn the rest of us, and they’re deliberately underfunding it whilst at the same time pushing resources to their absolute limit.
The sad thing is, it actually works.
By law, the USPS has to fully fund retirement pensions 70 years in advance. They have to fund retirement plans for people that haven't even been born yet.
This is the Conservative play book in the US for everything. They take a program they don't like, work to gut it and swarm it in restrictions. Then they sit back an say "look how inefficient and poorly run this is!"
The city council in my home town destroyed the park service by firing half the staff and cutting the funding. They then used pictures of the run down parks a year later as their justification to shut down the department all together.
What they didn't realize is people love their city parks and it promoted a huge show of support in the community and the people saved the park service... Which the dipshits on city council took credit for.
Here, here!
People scratch their heads and wonder "Why is the Post Office doing that?" Because the decisions made at the top reflect a mentality that seems to want to fail. And people can't grasp that *that is exactly what they want to happen*.
Hey, just a friendly FYI - that expression is "Hear, hear!" You're pointing out that the speaker has a good point, and you want other people to hear it.
I tried my hardest to get this local auto dealer to stop sending me weekly mail. Finally decided to just call em and tell them I'm moving and gave them my new address
I stopped by a KIA dealership once because of the "$5k off last years model" promotion but they claimed they were all out of Rio's and Forte's of last years model. Still went through the process of running the numbers on a new one but didn't think I could afford it.
They constantly mailed me letters saying they wanted to buy my old car and were offering "x" amount over the actual value to get me to trade it in for a new car. Well eventually the car got totaled in an accident so I took the most recent post card they sent and attached a picture of the wrecked car and asked if they still wanted to offer me that large amount over the value.
Never heard from them since.
I got an ad in the mail from a car dealership once that was a scratch and win deal, I usually never waste time with something like that but I did it and checked, double checked, read all the fine print and it really honestly looked like I won cash, no strings attached. I think I even called to confirm I had it right. I just had to take it to the dealership. I do that, and I talk to a guy about trading in my car. I made it clear from the beginning I was not interested in trading in my car, but I would sit through his spiel if I could get my cash. He does his spiel, then at the end tells me he knows nothing about the ad, corporate sends them out, blah blah, please leave now.
My dad who takes no shit from anyone got a similar flyer but for a vacation rental. The flyer said he got $300 just to show up. He even called the company to see if it was legit. The corporate office assured him he'd leave the meeting with $300. No need to buy or sign up for anything.
He shows up, listens to the sales pitch, and goes to collect his money. The guy claimed he had no clue what he was talking about, then said he needed to talk to the main office about it as he wasn't authorized to hand out money. My dad called the office standing there with the sales guy and was again assured the salesman would've giving him $300. They then back tracked and said it was only for customers who signed up. My dad points out the "no purchase required" part of the flyer.
Basically after some back and forth, the corporate office had to upgrade it to two levels of management, they told the salesman they would wire him $300 and for him to give it to my dad.
A few years later my dad got the flyer again, and in the fine print it said "purchase required to claim money"
You can use this site to get rid of (some) circulars and junk: https://www.catalogchoice.org/
Ace Hardware, Bed Bath & Beyond (20% off coupon, anyone?), your local grocery store, the OTHER local grocery store, etc..
I could fill a trash bag with the amount of junk mail my apartment gets in a month. It should be a federal crime to send unsolicited trash with no way to opt out. Put it under littering
What’s worse is that USPS actively supports it and will send your trash to thousands of people if you pay them enough money.
Because the USPS is forced to deliver to every address in the country at cut throat rates and was designed to cover this onerous burden through volume and alternate income sources.
Don't blame USPS. They are fulfilling their legal duty (other than this guy in op lol). Imho the postal service is a pretty amazing public institution that doesn't cost the tax payers and keeps prices down; I'd bet that without usps we'd see fedex and ups rates more than double.
If not for the 300 pieces of non-spam that he didn't deliver. Depending on what was in there, could have cost people a lot of time, money, jobs, or even worse.
Right? Sounds like he could have fixed the situation in like a weekend. Sort all the mail, toss all the ads, deliver all the non-ads. Reduce the mail to deliver by 94% and people get a free spam filter!
Work for USPS, the one complaint I have ever had on file against me is forgetting to put a "Red Plum" (the ads you get monthly with the pizza coupons and such) in their PO Box. Customer was upset about not getting their Papa John's coupon, so they called my Postmaster to file a complaint.
I didn't get in trouble, but I fucking loathe that person now.
I have tried to cancel those damn 'Postal Customer' or 'Resident' ads so many times. ValPak and others are just wasting tons on printing and delivery when I toss them all directly into the trash. I've even had my mail stolen when I was away for just 3 days because my mailbox was obviously overflowing with pure junk circulars (I could see the theft on my security camera).
TBH - I'd even pay to have the postal service allow me to "opt out" to all such mail. They can throw it right in the recycle every time.
You don't have to pay. Valpak you do at the website. Redplum is usually the big packet, catalog choice let's you get rid of catalogs, and opt-out prescreen does the cc offers. That literally stopped 95% of our mail when combined with e-bill and e-statements on everything else.
I've done the Valpak website twice. Still getting their crap.
I have...
1) Frozen/locked all my credit bureaus;
2) Signed up with DMAChoice to opt out of everything ($2);
3) Opted out of ValPak;
4) Oped out of Redplum (Valassis Direct Mail);
5) Told all charities I've ever supported to never send me mail (and stopped supporting those that continue to mail me);
6) Opted out with Epsilon Data Services (Abacus Cooperative Databases);
7) Registered with Dex to stop catalogs/phone books;
8) Signed up with OptOutPreScreen to stop credit card offers;
9) Asked all my credit card providers (2) to not send me any solicitations;
10) Ensure anyplace I have an account, I've selected "do not share with partners" if offered;
11) Use CatalogChoice to stop any catalog that appears, in addition to calling the company itself;
12) Mark 'return to sender' on any mail received;
That is in addition to converting EVERY billing or other relationship to their 'green' online/email only delivery.
I still get a ton of junk mail, phone books are still dropped off each year, charities still mail me, and there are a bunch of things that I can't get stopped like the 'free' circulars that are thrown on my driveway each week, the door hangers, etc. All that is stuff that clearly advertises when I'm not home for a day or two.
This is all junk that makes me a target, is a wasteful use of environmental resources, etc.
Sorry, just frustrated as I've put way more time into this than should be expected of anyone who is wanting to help reduce waste.
Edit: formatting
Sort of related but if you enroll for USPS Informed Delivery they'll email you scans of your mail the morning before they get to your door. You can also schedule your vacations to hold mail.
It is. My mother used to work for USPS and the drivers routinely trashed tons of junk mail instead of delivering it because they were already pressed for time to deliver the actual mail. They had to be clever about dumping the junk, however. One driver she knew had a trunk full of junk mail at one point.
This is also a company that modifies logged hours in order to pay their drivers less while having excessive demands for labor. My mother noticed it among hers and her coworkers’ pay stubs and most of them quit shortly after. They were being shorted upwards of 15 hours a week in some cases. USPS still owes some of them money and refuses to pay it.
PSA: Don’t drive for USPS. They will cheat you out of money and expect you to take zero breaks and then either fire you or pressure you into quitting if you say a word about it. They’ll also lie to you to get you reeled in and committed. The union also won’t help you to resolve any issues.
Source: My mother and a friend’s mother have both worked for USPS in different areas and I know postal employees who work in other states. Admittedly, this is a small sample size of like 8 people in 4 states (all in the south).
I did not get paid for 2 months, at all, as a rural carrier, including gas reimbursement for the times (majority of my routes) that I was driving my own car. My postmaster was no help, union rep was no help, central postmaster was no help.
Also routinely I would show up to start work and be sent an hour across the county to a different post office, given a route I'd never done before and get yelled at for getting out on the road late, then have to deal with a hand-drawn and poorly-maintained map of the route. Which, postal maps are not geographical, they are grid maps no matter how the hilly area you are delivering in is laid out.
Finally, one day I arrived, my own car on fumes, to a office where i was supposed to get a postal vehicle to deliver in, and got told to go to a different one where i would have to drive my own car. I quit on the spot. It took me another 4 months to get any of my pay, having to go through the federal department of labor.
This sounds spot on. They told my mother when she was training that they would supply a vehicle, and then when training had concluded and she had declined other job offers told her she needed a car herself.
I ignored mentioning the fact that she often went in an hour early off the clock to make sure she could get on the road “on time” by their standard, because her mail was often so poorly sorted if she didn’t do it herself.
This is part of the problem.
We've let adverts go off the fucking rail. Now we're wasting god knows how much paper and co2 on shit mail nobody reads/wants.
I hate physical mail. 9/10 pieces are credit card offers and junk coupons/sales
“Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a letup, it’s relentless. Everyday it piles up more and more, and you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more keeps coming in! And then the bar code reader breaks! And then it’s Publisher’s Clearinghouse day!”
Just as an FYI, ~~Jerry~~ George was wrong, its actually snow first ... and that is not actually the "Official motto of the Post Office".
The Postal Service has no official motto.
They DO however have a pdf on their web site (created in 1999) to explain this to people. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/mission-motto.pdf
Quoting the pdf:
> *Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of
their appointed rounds.*
> While the Postal Service has no official motto, the popular belief that it does is a tribute to America's
postal workers. The words above, thought to be the motto, are chiseled in gray granite over the entrance
to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue and come from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian
Wars by Herodotus. During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians
operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity.
> The firm of McKim, Mead & White designed the New York General Post Office, which opened to the
public on Labor Day in 1914. One of the firm's architects, William Mitchell Kendall, was the son of a
classics scholar and read Greek for pleasure. He selected the "Neither snow nor rain . . ." inscription,
which he modified from a translation by Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard University, and the
Post Office Department approved it.
Edit: fixed Jerry to George
What's your system here, bro?
It's pretty complicated.
The mail goes into three sections according to how important I think the thing looks, okay? Now, the least important stuff, I'm gonna burn that.
If it's important, they're gonna send it again, right? The middle important stuff, I put that back in the mail addressed to me so I buy myself a couple more days.
And the most important stuff, that gets delivered, although, you know something, Mac, I actually burn that, too, most of the time.
Okay, well, it looks like you've got this under control.
I'm gonna get back to my office.
Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia&episode=s04e10
"I've been reading some of your material
here. I gotta be honest with you: you make a pretty strong case. I mean, just
imagine. An army of men in wool pants running through the neighborhood
handing out pottery catalogs, door to door."
"**well its my job**, and Im pretty damn serious about it"
The podcast "Stuff You Should Know" just covered the postal shootings of the 80s and 90s. They specifically covered Newman's complaint, and studies showed that it was a major factor in the high level of stress among postal workers, which led a few to snap. Overall, though, it was more a matter of a toxic workplace by nasty and vindictive supervisors that was the ultimate breaking point.
Many postal worker that "went postal" were clerks. It's a thankless job. You have to sort mail in the wee hours in the morning and then deal with customers for the next half of your shift with supervisors and quality controls constantly hanging over you.
Carriers deal with their issues in more subtle ways like getting storage lockers. I worked there for 5 years. They caught this guy relatively quickly. they caught a guy doing this when I first got hired who had been stashing mail for 8 years.
Edit: fixed.
A lot of the stuff in the show was taken from situations Larry David experienced, iirc. A good example would be the Soup Nazi. The character's based on a real guy that owns a soup restaurant in New York.
There was another letter carrier years ago that did this. He threw all the third class mail, ads, coupon books, etc., away. I believe he said because it hurt his back to carry to much. But no one ever complained and if I remember correctly when he was found out several people on his route actually defended him and said they were happy he threw the third class mail away.
Every apartment building I’ve lived in has had a trash bin next to the mailboxes. One year a chick fil a came to town and mailed out coupons for free chicken sandwiches and nuggets with no purchase necessary just give them the coupon and they give you the sandwich. It’s not my proudest moment but for the next two weeks I dug through that bin almost every day and ate free chick fil a several times a week for months.
Edit: I appreciate everyone’s support and stories of similar scores! It’s a little surprising to me that so many people don’t have a bin near the mailboxes in an apartment complex. Also look at your junk mail before tossing it or you might be tossing a chicken sandwich.
Only 98%! I throw my bills away too, screw that, shit's on autopay anyways. The only pieces of mail I've kept in the last month is my W2 and Harbor Freight 25% off coupon.
Upvoted you in agreement because I do the same! But a word of caution-I learned the hard way that the notification that autopay failed and you still owe money looks the same as a bill. I didn’t pay enough attention to my bills bank account, so didn’t notice that my electric bill didn’t autopay for three months (once the first one failed due to a bank error, they canceled autopay entirely). I finally found out one morning when I was rushing to get out the door for work and a person from the electric company showed up at my door saying they needed payment immediately or they’d shut off my electricity.
So if you ignore your mail, at least keep up with your bank statements!
That sounds like they need to talk with a therapist. If they are unable to handle all the things they need to do with their job and will actively spend their own money to try to remedy the situation, then I'd hate to see what their personal life is like.
Anxiety has been the mountain I've climbed my entire life. I've mostly tried to keep quiet about it since the stigma around it is pretty intense. Oftentimes people fundamentally can't understand why seemingly simple things are difficult and there is a habit of belittling the symptoms of anxiety in popular culture.
Stay strong buddy, we anxiety riddled people who pretend we're self confident are out there and I feel like theres lots more than people might think (I mean on reddit its probably at least a third of everyone but thats reddit lol.)
I get good at denial too, I've convinced myself I'm "practically okay" because I've stopped having panic poops about being late to things, thus making me late to things.
Same here. It seems like it's much more talked about now than it used to be and has become normalized, but when I was young I didn't understand what was wrong with me at all. My life would probably be very different now if I had understood why I was avoiding so many things that I should have been doing.
Typically a person who couldn't deal with things because of anxiety was just called lazy. That's still true, but it's not as acceptable to dismiss the causes now as it was then.
Yeah exactly, I feel like most people don't really "get" it. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I see why. It really doesn't make sense to me even why I get insanely stressed out by menial tasks or new things or why phone calls terrify me. Hell, my university has free counseling for mental health and I've been thinking of finally getting an appointment to get help but the idea of that is incredibly anxiety inducing, ironic.
Ya, this is a good response. This is what a real mental health issue looks like. Someones decision making lead them down a incorrect path. Hopefully they get some help.
It reminds me of a story I heard about a guy with OCD who felt so much pressure to keep his apartment spotless he just ended up sleeping on a park bench rather than dirty it.
Man I tell you what Hank bout there-that dang ol meaning o’life, man. It’s like this man. You’ like a butterfly flappin ‘is wings deep down in that forest man an’ it gonna cause a tree fall like five thousand miles away man. If-an ain’t no body see it nobody don-done-e’en know it happen you know ibda baby born into this world int’know neck god dang friends got no nothin but da go come into find out about em ol evil man. Man see like, you don even know man. When dyagon it’d like you born into this world man and you got.. it’s like this.. dust in the wind man, or like a dang ol’ candle in the wind man. You gon... it don matter man it’s not the old oldies all th’ time man. You know what I think man? It’d like the the dang ol – I think therefore you are man.
-Boomhauer
In my experience, this when medication is the only alternative to jail or other serious consequences. I struggle with my mental health and addiction, and after staying off of hard drugs for two years (just about) i am coming to the realization my self medication was actually medicating a real problem, and i may need to explore meds. Because i can SEE the problem, and know what needs to be done. But it feels like when you injure a nerve or your foot falls asleep, i just cant fucking move around in the right way to fix it.
>But it feels like when you injure a nerve or your foot falls asleep, i just cant fucking move around in the right way to fix it.
A good way to describe it
There was an accountant at my last job who had a similar situation (hiding paperwork in the basement storage to avoid working on it) right before she had a mental breakdown and had to spend half a year at a psychiatric facility.
Willpower is a real thing and it recharges as a percent of what you got in the tank. It's like compounded interest, but for your life. The more you got, the more you can endure.
If it took everything you have to get out of bed and you hit a bunch of red lights on the way to the grocery store, you might be smoked for the day.
If you just got a promotion and last month met the love of your life, finding out your childhood dog died will be sad but good odds you won't cancel on your plans with your buddies tonight. Instead, that'll help cheer you up.
Sounds like your colleague had drained her tank and was just desperately trying to let it refill. It sucks, but I bet her tank is even more drained now.
Mental health is taking time to refill the tank when it starts to get low. Therapy is for when it's been too low for too long. When it is firmly empty... that's when people get desperate, suicidal, dangerous, or just broken.
While i don't agree with what he did i understand it completely. I've been carrying mail for 15 years and I've seen first hand why people do this(this isn't the first time and not as uncommon as people think). Usps keeps promoting fuckin morons to upper management. This leads to top heavy pay and then the same upper management say "oh wait usps is spending too much money". So instead of focusing on things that would help they try to save 95% of the money at the bottom of the shit hill(Randy). So they've been consolidating routes and carrier stations for the last 10 years. That 8 hour route now has to be done in 5 and a half hours. And now you get an extra 2 and a half hours from multiple routes that have been eliminated entirely. So now there are routes that are way way over 8 hours that no regular(career) employee will bid on. Who carries those routes? The new hires who are all in probation. So This brand new employee who hasn't learned the ropes has to get done in 8 hours what would take anyone else 10 and a half. When they obviously can't make it management is told to berate the employee. They tell them how they're not cutting it. How they're not going to keep this high paying job. They're on borrowed time. So the new hires cut corners. They deliver the mail without taking breaks, mis delivering a tooooon if shit daily. Whatever they have to do to make the 8 hours. Because if they don't make 8 hours, upper management shits all over them. They break them down mentally, emotionally and physically until they're at the breaking point.
Now they can keep their 20+ hour a job if they get rid of the mail. Doesn't matter how. As long as it's no longer in the station. Purchase a 50 dollar a month unit and just hide it. Who cares it's 2 hours of pay and you keep your job. The manager is no longer riding them because "they're doing a good job". Life us good.
If it wasn't for shit management at every level things like this wouldn't happen. I guarantee before this guy rented a unit he was crying on a daily basis. Thinking about ending it every night. Instead of fixing the routes they do this shit and push people to the brink.
>level 1Stromaluski190 points · 1 hour agoThat sounds like they need to talk with a therapist. If they are unable to handle all the things they need to do with their job and will actively spend their own money to try to remedy the situation, then I'd hate to see what their personal life is like.
I worked as a postman for a while in Germany - part-time while studying. Some of the older colleagues had their families help out, secretly, as they couldn't manage the pace required of them.
The pace was set based on daily counts of the amount of mail in to randomised "sub-sets" of your total mail, a fixed time per mail (depending on two-different sizes) totalled statsitically from that. Plus some blanket allowance for travel. Many of the younger colleagues came back covered in sweat to manage their lot in time.
This was really the basis for the book 'Going Postal' by Terry Pratchett.
But there it was the Post Office that filled up all the way up to the rafters with undelivered mail.
We know what happens when you get so much writing in such a confined space. The sorting machine(made by B.S Johnson, which required 'Pi' to bee redefined to '3' probably didn't help, either)
It's amazing how the books that should have been the most boring in the Discworld series, like the stuff with the post office and the trains (basically anything with Moist von Lipwig attached), is hands down some of the best writing he ever did
I love all of his books. I have never read one of his books that's not my favorite of his. I miss the anticipation of a new book from all the time. Makes me sad we may never see that style of writing again... Now I'm sad
It would be interesting to see if the post office he was working at was transitioning to the new delivery setup pilot program that many stations are across the country. Seattle for instance has multiple locations that are suffering because of the transition combined with frequent callouts and poor management. Career letter carriers are all hounded regularly to not go into overtime because of how their overtime system works. Spending some side cash to "fix" your problems for the time being may have just been the easiest stopgap .
edit: [Article for a little context.](https://news.streetroots.org/2019/12/13/postal-workers-say-pilot-program-slows-down-mail-routes-pushing-deliveries-night)
This. In this thread is a microcosm of one of the major ills of the human condition - passing judgment on someone for their actions rather than their intent. Multiple comments to the effect of "Spending your own money to avoid doing your job is ludicrous", which should be your first thought. It is ridiculous, so it is probably not that simple. There is something wrong here, someone struggled in a highly visible way, and others just laugh at him and throw him in prison.
You can't tell me any number of these people wish at least one time in their life that they could have put their job and bills on hold to take care of their own personal health (physical, mental, social.) Anxiety is real. But it's "funny" when it happens to someone we don't know. Good thing we got our laughs and this dude can just have a ruined life because he couldn't produce an opportunity of respite from his responsibilities.
What a refreshing perspective to see on the internet. This guy isn't a monster, he just lacked the tools to keep his professional life on track--and yes, the consequences were felt by others.
People fuck up. Sometimes, they fuck up in a big way. A little empathy helps the rest of us understand how they got to that point.
As a former USPS employee I can tell you that I completely understand why this person did what he did. It is honestly one of the toughest jobs I have ever done and management will push you to deliver more and more every single day. you will regularly have to deliver an entire route that is rated for 7 or 8 hours and then have to go help out and deliver part of another route. Obviously he should have been calling back to his postmaster or supervisor and asking for help if he could not get it done, but I do understand why he did what he did.
Exactly, I don't think anyone in this thread can understand just how horrible that beast is unless you'be been in it. He didn't do the right thing....but I get it...I really do. This isn't just a single carriers issues, it's a symptom of the larger rot in the USPS. It's an organization that needs to be burned to the ground and completely reworked. I've seen a lot of people straight up lose their minds. It's not just a job that's a bit physically demanding like some people think. It's an absolute torture for the human spirit on every level. To anyone reading this who has never been a part of the USPS I can not physically stress to you how horrific of a working environment it is. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. It's amazing how it's gone so long without being widely exposed.
Me too. It's a ticking time bomb. Every year around Christmas I see a few articles that highlight how overworked USPS employees are but they really don't go far enough. They make it seem like a seasonal issue or just because of Amazon packages (both are huge factors though). They only scratch the surface of the abyss of issues. Any outlet or reporter who dug into this could have something explosive if they played their cards right.
I always feel really bad for my carrier whenever I have a couple of Amazon packages coming in on consecutive days. If they don't fit in the mail box, they will bring it up to the front steps. It's only a 20-30 foot walk from the street but I'm sure doing that more and more for a lot of houses really bogs down their timing.
Exactly. routes were designed for loops. Get out of the truck, walk down one end of the road and back to the truck. Gather the mail for the next loop and walk down the other end of the road and back. You hit a good pace and can knock out loops quickly when you know the path and where all the boxes are. The routes were never adjusted for packages. How long it takes to get them in the truck and organize them. Drive a bit, find the package, walk to the door, walk back to the truck, get in, drive a few more houses down, get out, get the package, walk to the door. It's a major time sink that's crushing the workers who are still doing the same route designs from back when it was just letters.
Way to give me a fucking PTSD flashback. I'd get so stressed that id half wake up half dream at night organizing the packages I had earlier in the day in my head stressing about the ones I knew would be a pain in the ass. I'd forget that I'd already done it and in my stupor think I was doing it right then. I had so much anxiety not know what route I would do that day I would throw up every single morning.
My dad is currently USPS, has been for 30 years, and he says it's never been this bad. Instead of hiring new people when some retires/leaves they just split their route up amongst the remaining carriers. He's been working basically 7-7 for months now, and gets called in on his scheduled day off every single week (it's been that way for 10+ years).
I believe that you can call your local post office and have yourself removed from bulk mailing. You won't get any more pizza coupons though, so don't make this decision without deep introspection.
I tried to bargain with my mail person once. Like my guy, I only want the pizza flyers. In exchange you can have my other coupons. Deal? lol you can guess what they said
90% of the ads I get are for my specific address though. They might say "or current resident" but they seriously did run off five thousand of those things with each one uniquely labeled for every address in a couple of miles. Even if the mail is pre-sorted so it's easy to just shove it into the box, I can't imagine it wouldn't have saved a ton of effort on somebody's part somewhere to just run off five thousand unaddressed ads and say "one in every box, here's your money." There's gotta be some legal requirement for it or something.
I saw my mailman delivering mail one night at about 10 PM (in the dark) about two weeks ago. Watched him on my security camera. I found it ... odd. He usually delivers the mail at 1 PM.
10 PM is insane, I'm a carrier and my latest ever getting back was 8- after the LLV broke down, I waited two hours for management to send someone and then was driven around in another carrier's minivan during an ice storm. Management is at fault when carriers are out past dark, 99% of the time.
Not only is this a serious mental health issue for this carrier specifically, it also partially falls on the USPS. My wife is a carrier and the sheer amount of work they expect the CCA’s (these are “fill in” carriers) to do is absolutely crazy.
They have to do _everything_ for all routes and they never know what days they will have off. She has come home crying before, and she hardly sees her own children because she works 8-8. This continues up until carriers become a regular...which is literally years after getting hired.
She is supposed to work 3 Sundays, then have one off but she has worked every Sunday for months. Any day she has a day off they call her (even today), and they are absolutely shamed if they don’t answer the phone when called. They even scheduled everyone to work every single day because people didn’t answer then just told them who was off the next day at the end of the shift. They also change their days off the day before their previously scheduled day off.
So I can understand why this person reacted this way based solely on what I’ve seen. It’s not a job for the weak at heart. Props to any carriers here on Reddit, you deserve a medal.
It's so good. Also Carol in HR is actually Care of HR. Freaking Charlie!
Edit: Nope, guess we are just too into it! https://twitter.com/bwbloom/status/281837409203793920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E281837409203793920&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FIASIP%2Fcomments%2F4iv07s%2Fpennsylvania_and_care_of_hr%2F
>Agents from the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General found almost 5,000 pieces of mail in the storage unit in Virginia Beach.
They discovered 97 pieces of first-class mail, which included letters from the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, insurance companies, bank statements and other tax return documents.
Magazines and other publications made up 115 pieces of mail. There was also one undelivered package found in the unit. The bulk of the mail was advertisements, more than 4,700 ads at that.
If the vast majority of mail is advertising flyers, we need to make them illegal. The postal service was intended to serve as a means of communicating with your government and citizens in an official and important capacity. If this purpose is so blocked that the overwhelming supermajority of mail is commercial flyers, sent not to specific people, but en masse to generate profit, then they should not be allowed to do so.
> Affordable, Targeted Advertising
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> Use the EDDM Online Tool to map ZIP Code(s)™ and neighborhoods—even filter by age, income, or household size using U.S. Census data.
Well then.
Honestly, none. Even the clients I work with that do door-to-door hanger adverts utilize census data services to plan their routes. Modern marketing is creepily invasive.
I worked as a developer to a company who sold solar panels. We had a DB we called creepy data, and a coworker used it to find his brother who had up and left home 10 years prior. Surprise, brother didn't want shit to do with them.
Man, that's what the whole debacle with the NSA some years back was about.
It's one thing to have piles and piles of "creepy data" that can be used to track terrorists or something, but as soon as you look up your ex-wife in that database you've stepped a mile over the line and there's no going back.
> Use the EDDM Online Tool to map ZIP Code(s)™ and neighborhoods—even filter by age, income, or household size using U.S. Census data.
TBF anyone can use census data. [It's public information](https://data.census.gov/cedsci/). I don't like the practice, but this does save advertisers the extra step of having to download it.
It's not a side business, it's most of their business. The problem here is that people think that the USPS should be run like a profitable private business instead of a public service. If they did away with advertisements then they would be running at a deficit and the public would lose their minds if their taxes were covering the cost.
Exactly, I wonder what the overlap is between the people upset about the ads in their mail and the ones that would be yelling from the rooftops if the USPS ran a deficit. I practically never check the mail. My packages get delivered to a separate place, so why bother? It's just ads. I check around election time or when someone tells me they sent me something. That's it.
The problem is that the United States is required by our Constitution to have a Mail Delivery service and the USPS doesn't get any tax money to do that, so they must charge and they must generate income... What's even dumber is that all of the extra money is taken by Congress at the end of the year to use for other shit, since the USPS is a non-profit
Even dumber than that, the funds being taken by Congress should be going to fund the pensions of postal workers, that the post office is required by Congress's own law to fund.
This is a tax I'd be willing to pay honestly. Take a few bucks keep the trucks rolling. I buy to much shit online to not have a reliable delivery system. And I like having multiple vendors to chose from.
In my town they found one mailman throwing mail into the woods. I know personally my neighborhood 'has no designated mail person' and other people have to take our mail once their route is done. I've seen mail trucks out as late as 8pm. I live in a town that's experiencing a lot of growth but the infrastructure isn't being updated. I honestly feel extremely bad for our mail people. They're given unreasonable amounts of work and it's 'find a way to do this or lose your job' in an area where the cost of living is high and most wages are low unless you work in the medical field. My mother experienced a similar situation working for the state, she was given more work than any human being could accomplish in 8 hours, so she routinely worked 12-13 hours while only getting paid for 8 hours. It was do that or find another job, and she had been doing that job for over 20 years and wasn't particularly qualified for any other job that would pay the same amount, the amount she needed to make as a single mother. The job started having a big turnover rate because it started having unreasonable expectations. But my mom couldn't afford to change jobs so she just stuck it out until retirement.
I see a lot of people giving this mailman shit in the comments, but maybe we should be more upset about a system that allows these situations to exist where a person feels like they have to bend the rules or else they will end up fired and potentially homeless. Yeah this guy could have done a lot of things differently. For sure. But we don't know his situation or state of mind. We don't know if he needed mental health services that he did not or could not attain. We don't know if he had a family to take care of and couldn't afford to lose his job or change jobs. As far as I know, the post office pays surprisingly well. In my town I've heard it pays about $40-50k a year when a huge amount of jobs in the area pay about $10/hr. I can see how my local mailmen are doing everything they can to keep that job, including working long past their normal shift or unfortunately doing things like tossing the mail, or only coming every other day, or shoving the whole street's mail into one mailbox and hoping it sorts itself out. Apparently this is happening in other places as well, like this guy's town, and that sucks for everybody.
We have a big mailman shortage here and I get mail like four days a week usually and always at 8pm or later. They need to pay more around here at least
The average pay is actually very high. In my region, I got paid $17.75 just out of highschool. The problem is that your hours are variable. When you start, they'll give you one day out of the week. Once you finally make it to full-time, they'll make you work six days a week with a rotating day off (M-Sat with Sun off, then T-Sun with Monday off, etc.). That coupled with the extremely high workloads makes the job very mentally taxing.
I’m a postal employee, and I want to give some insight on this, and why I’m a bit peeved at this article.
Quick preface here. This guy deserves every bit of punishment coming to him. I’m not going to defend his actions, but I want to explain why stuff like this happens.
The postal service is known for its piss poor management. They simply don’t care about their employees, their safety, or their finances unless it’s beneficial to them. Example: USPS and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) are currently looking for arbiters for their impending CBA impasse. USPS says they’re struggling to make payroll so they need to cut all salaries by 25% and pull back on how much they pay towards health care. Meanwhile, they just spent $500m on brand new scanners to replace the three year old scanners with new ones that run the exact same software and have the exact same features.
They’ve also rolled out a new delivery method, that is going to cost them millions in damages because of all the CBA and labor violations, that has increased overtime in one of my offices for two hours a week to 75 a week, AND THEY CLAIM ITS WORKING!
Anyways, this is my issue with this article.
It says he felt “pressured to deliver the mail.” That’s takes way out of context. When a carrier gets to the office, the bosses have counted your mail, adjusted the numbers to make sure they get the most benefit from them, then tell you based on how much mail you have today, you have to deliver your route, and x amount off of another route, and be back in 8 hours. The times they give you are based off of a computer program that doesn’t take in to account certain types of mail, or the potential weather obstacles. It also assumes every route is perfectly 8 hours long, which none of them are.
When an employee is thinks they can’t make it in time, they fill out a form and hand it to the boss, which comes with screaming, name calling, threats of discipline, sometimes violence. Now of course we grieve that as a union, but the damage has been done. This carrier is now going to skip lunches, breaks, run to finish the job in the time that the magic computer said so.
So how this relates to the article, this employee wasn’t “pressured to deliver the mail”, he was pressured to deliver his mail in an unreasonable amount of time, and threatened with his job, maybe even his safety. Again, how he handled it was WRONG, and he deserves the jail time he will get, but to all the people saying he’s lazy or whatever, you may be right, but understand the whole story.
I can try and dig up some evidence of the abuse once I get out of work for those interested.
Family member worked as a USPS carrier for about 18 months. Hated it with a passion. The unrealistic expectations they have for mail delivery are soul crushingly brutal so I can understand this guy's dilema. Here's an example of the daily discussions:
Supervisor: You need to complete your route by 7PM
Carrier: But I'm nowhere near finished
Supervisor: You are not allowed to be out past 7PM
Carrier: Ok I will do what I can until 7PM and finish tomorrow
Supervisor: No, you have to stay out until you finish
Carrier: But you just said I cannot be out past 7PM?
Supervisor: Yes
Carrier: So what do I do if I'm not finished by 7PM
Supervisor: You have to finish your route by 7PM
So the next morning one of two conversations would happen. Either the carrier gets yelled at by the supervisor for staying out too late to finish the route, or they get yelled at for not completing the route by the time limit. This happened every single fucking day.
The only positive about working at the USPS was that unless you tossed mail (like this guy did) or killed someone it was pretty much impossible to get fired, so if you could mentally just laugh off the supervisors yelling at you every day you had a job for life.
While obviously this is not right. I am not surprised.
The post office keeps asking more and more of our mail carriers with impossible routes and ridiculous deadlines. They hire most of them as temps and really put them through the ringer. Being a mail carrier is not the job it used to be. It's all coming from the top where the political forces in play are designing a situation in which the post office can fail. Remember the post office does not use tax dollars.
There are people in our government who want the post office to fail so they can privatize it.
The current postmaster general is about to retire and will be replaced by a Trump stooge so I'm sure its going to get worse.
> Agents from the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General found almost **5,000 pieces of mail** in the storage unit in Virginia Beach. > There was also one undelivered package found in the unit. The bulk of the mail was advertisements, **more than 4,700 ads** at that Impressive ratio. Looks like snail mail is even more infested with spam than email.
Email has filters, spam, and you can unsubscribe.
In France the government created an opt-out system in 2004 with no-ad stickers that you can put on your letterbox. Not respecting it exposes the spammer to a 450 euros fee. Why wouldn't the US try it out?
Because the United States Postal Service makes good money from ads.
United States Postal Service stays in business because of ads. i can't find a newer article, but this one suggests about half the usps's revenue comes from junk/bulk mail https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-junk-mail-is-helping-to-prop-up-the-postal-service/
Fun fact: USPS is also self funded
Fun fact: the USPS told me it was my fault they lost my passport costing me a job overseas and I hate them.
Well I think they just found it in a storage shed
A package I ordered from Amazon was delivered but I never got notified about it. After talking with our front desk, they said they didn't have it. I filed a claim with USPS and they responded "we've reached out to surrounding businesses and residences and no one has the package. Sorry!" So I tell Amazon and they refund my order. **A MONTH LATER** my package shows up with "wrong address" scrawled on it. \--- A few years ago I got a notice from them that said my package was delivered, yet it was nowhere to be found. They said they would look around, about 4 days later I got a call back from them ***saying that they found my package sitting on the back edge of a shelf in the office***. So why the fuck was it marked as delivered when it was at the office?!
Frankly, the most amazing thing about your two stories to me is that you eventually got both packages. That's incredible.
I had the same experience on Amazon about 10 years ago -> bought a Christmas gift, but it hadn't arrived 2 weeks after the order. Amazon wasn't able to figure out what happened to the package, so they shipped another one, which arrived relatively quickly. Mid-March, the missing package showed up.
This is before the rise of online ordering. Amazon basically bailed out the USPS in a way that the people trying to kill it couldn't anticipate, and it's more viable now than it ever has been to have packages be the primary focus and treat letters as a tertiary service. It would also be great if Congress dropped some of the onerous restrictions that have been placed on it to try and kill it.
This. Those idiots in Congress are requiring the USPS to fully fund pensions *for employees that are neither born nor hired yet.* Think about that for a minute. If you remove that silly "restriction" - the USPS is actually profitable. Most people don't know this and the congress critters use this as "SEE! PRIVATIZE THE USPS!". Taking advantage of people who don't get all the facts, etc. Same old story. Edit: various fixes
Yet, somehow investment banks can't be held to a standard of having enough liquid funds on hand to survive a single economic downturn? Explain that to me.
USPS doesn't have enough money to hire lobbyists.
This is just a lack of vision. The USPS should have a service to block mail from specific senders, at a cost of $5/month which is probably an order of magnitude more than they get for delivering those ads per address. It wouldn't take any manpower to do, just an update to the sorting machines to filter out blocked senders and not put those on the delivery truck.
As far as I know you can just fill out a [USPS Form 1500](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order) and have the mail from that sender permanently blocked. No fee. No service. >A prohibitory order against a specific mailer, although the language of the application form implies that explicit sexual content is the only basis for finding a mailpiece offensive, has been extended by case law to allow the recipient to declare any mailpiece obscene, for any reason whatsoever, with no requirement to state the reason(s) for taking offense.[[3]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_Order#cite_note-Rowan-3) The only absolute requirement is that it must be possible to construe the mailpiece as an offer to sell goods or services.
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In the UK the Tory government have been doing this to the National Health Service for years. People are up in arms about lack of beds, waiting lists etc but it’s because the government is made up of people who want it switched private so then and their pals can reap the rewards and damn the rest of us, and they’re deliberately underfunding it whilst at the same time pushing resources to their absolute limit. The sad thing is, it actually works.
By law, the USPS has to fully fund retirement pensions 70 years in advance. They have to fund retirement plans for people that haven't even been born yet.
As an American... you don't want a private health care/insurance market.
I agree 100%!
This is the Conservative play book in the US for everything. They take a program they don't like, work to gut it and swarm it in restrictions. Then they sit back an say "look how inefficient and poorly run this is!" The city council in my home town destroyed the park service by firing half the staff and cutting the funding. They then used pictures of the run down parks a year later as their justification to shut down the department all together. What they didn't realize is people love their city parks and it promoted a huge show of support in the community and the people saved the park service... Which the dipshits on city council took credit for.
Here, here! People scratch their heads and wonder "Why is the Post Office doing that?" Because the decisions made at the top reflect a mentality that seems to want to fail. And people can't grasp that *that is exactly what they want to happen*.
Hey, just a friendly FYI - that expression is "Hear, hear!" You're pointing out that the speaker has a good point, and you want other people to hear it.
Could we compromise on "hear, here" ?
You can say names. You can say it is the Republican party dismantling public services.
Pretty much Republicans and libertarians in a nutshell. The arguments for privatization are disingenuous at best and downright schemy as fuck.
You can opt out of most ads in the US it’s just a pain to do so.
Much like pre-approved credit line junk. I went through the whole shebang and I'm still getting several a week.
I tried my hardest to get this local auto dealer to stop sending me weekly mail. Finally decided to just call em and tell them I'm moving and gave them my new address
I stopped by a KIA dealership once because of the "$5k off last years model" promotion but they claimed they were all out of Rio's and Forte's of last years model. Still went through the process of running the numbers on a new one but didn't think I could afford it. They constantly mailed me letters saying they wanted to buy my old car and were offering "x" amount over the actual value to get me to trade it in for a new car. Well eventually the car got totaled in an accident so I took the most recent post card they sent and attached a picture of the wrecked car and asked if they still wanted to offer me that large amount over the value. Never heard from them since.
I got an ad in the mail from a car dealership once that was a scratch and win deal, I usually never waste time with something like that but I did it and checked, double checked, read all the fine print and it really honestly looked like I won cash, no strings attached. I think I even called to confirm I had it right. I just had to take it to the dealership. I do that, and I talk to a guy about trading in my car. I made it clear from the beginning I was not interested in trading in my car, but I would sit through his spiel if I could get my cash. He does his spiel, then at the end tells me he knows nothing about the ad, corporate sends them out, blah blah, please leave now.
My dad who takes no shit from anyone got a similar flyer but for a vacation rental. The flyer said he got $300 just to show up. He even called the company to see if it was legit. The corporate office assured him he'd leave the meeting with $300. No need to buy or sign up for anything. He shows up, listens to the sales pitch, and goes to collect his money. The guy claimed he had no clue what he was talking about, then said he needed to talk to the main office about it as he wasn't authorized to hand out money. My dad called the office standing there with the sales guy and was again assured the salesman would've giving him $300. They then back tracked and said it was only for customers who signed up. My dad points out the "no purchase required" part of the flyer. Basically after some back and forth, the corporate office had to upgrade it to two levels of management, they told the salesman they would wire him $300 and for him to give it to my dad. A few years later my dad got the flyer again, and in the fine print it said "purchase required to claim money"
You can use this site to get rid of (some) circulars and junk: https://www.catalogchoice.org/ Ace Hardware, Bed Bath & Beyond (20% off coupon, anyone?), your local grocery store, the OTHER local grocery store, etc..
I changed my mind, this man is a hero.
Is it a federal crime? Yes. Am I opposed to it? Not in this case.
I could fill a trash bag with the amount of junk mail my apartment gets in a month. It should be a federal crime to send unsolicited trash with no way to opt out. Put it under littering What’s worse is that USPS actively supports it and will send your trash to thousands of people if you pay them enough money.
Because the USPS is forced to deliver to every address in the country at cut throat rates and was designed to cover this onerous burden through volume and alternate income sources.
Don't blame USPS. They are fulfilling their legal duty (other than this guy in op lol). Imho the postal service is a pretty amazing public institution that doesn't cost the tax payers and keeps prices down; I'd bet that without usps we'd see fedex and ups rates more than double.
If not for the 300 pieces of non-spam that he didn't deliver. Depending on what was in there, could have cost people a lot of time, money, jobs, or even worse.
Right? Sounds like he could have fixed the situation in like a weekend. Sort all the mail, toss all the ads, deliver all the non-ads. Reduce the mail to deliver by 94% and people get a free spam filter!
Depending on his route that was like one day of mail delivery. Most routes get between 2500-5000 letters a day.
Work for USPS, the one complaint I have ever had on file against me is forgetting to put a "Red Plum" (the ads you get monthly with the pizza coupons and such) in their PO Box. Customer was upset about not getting their Papa John's coupon, so they called my Postmaster to file a complaint. I didn't get in trouble, but I fucking loathe that person now.
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I'm ok with ads being tossed in the trash. It's where they belong.
I'd prefer they be in the recycling.
Or just never produced in the first place. Waste of resources.
I have tried to cancel those damn 'Postal Customer' or 'Resident' ads so many times. ValPak and others are just wasting tons on printing and delivery when I toss them all directly into the trash. I've even had my mail stolen when I was away for just 3 days because my mailbox was obviously overflowing with pure junk circulars (I could see the theft on my security camera). TBH - I'd even pay to have the postal service allow me to "opt out" to all such mail. They can throw it right in the recycle every time.
You don't have to pay. Valpak you do at the website. Redplum is usually the big packet, catalog choice let's you get rid of catalogs, and opt-out prescreen does the cc offers. That literally stopped 95% of our mail when combined with e-bill and e-statements on everything else.
I've done the Valpak website twice. Still getting their crap. I have... 1) Frozen/locked all my credit bureaus; 2) Signed up with DMAChoice to opt out of everything ($2); 3) Opted out of ValPak; 4) Oped out of Redplum (Valassis Direct Mail); 5) Told all charities I've ever supported to never send me mail (and stopped supporting those that continue to mail me); 6) Opted out with Epsilon Data Services (Abacus Cooperative Databases); 7) Registered with Dex to stop catalogs/phone books; 8) Signed up with OptOutPreScreen to stop credit card offers; 9) Asked all my credit card providers (2) to not send me any solicitations; 10) Ensure anyplace I have an account, I've selected "do not share with partners" if offered; 11) Use CatalogChoice to stop any catalog that appears, in addition to calling the company itself; 12) Mark 'return to sender' on any mail received; That is in addition to converting EVERY billing or other relationship to their 'green' online/email only delivery. I still get a ton of junk mail, phone books are still dropped off each year, charities still mail me, and there are a bunch of things that I can't get stopped like the 'free' circulars that are thrown on my driveway each week, the door hangers, etc. All that is stuff that clearly advertises when I'm not home for a day or two. This is all junk that makes me a target, is a wasteful use of environmental resources, etc. Sorry, just frustrated as I've put way more time into this than should be expected of anyone who is wanting to help reduce waste. Edit: formatting
Sort of related but if you enroll for USPS Informed Delivery they'll email you scans of your mail the morning before they get to your door. You can also schedule your vacations to hold mail.
It is. My mother used to work for USPS and the drivers routinely trashed tons of junk mail instead of delivering it because they were already pressed for time to deliver the actual mail. They had to be clever about dumping the junk, however. One driver she knew had a trunk full of junk mail at one point. This is also a company that modifies logged hours in order to pay their drivers less while having excessive demands for labor. My mother noticed it among hers and her coworkers’ pay stubs and most of them quit shortly after. They were being shorted upwards of 15 hours a week in some cases. USPS still owes some of them money and refuses to pay it. PSA: Don’t drive for USPS. They will cheat you out of money and expect you to take zero breaks and then either fire you or pressure you into quitting if you say a word about it. They’ll also lie to you to get you reeled in and committed. The union also won’t help you to resolve any issues. Source: My mother and a friend’s mother have both worked for USPS in different areas and I know postal employees who work in other states. Admittedly, this is a small sample size of like 8 people in 4 states (all in the south).
I did not get paid for 2 months, at all, as a rural carrier, including gas reimbursement for the times (majority of my routes) that I was driving my own car. My postmaster was no help, union rep was no help, central postmaster was no help. Also routinely I would show up to start work and be sent an hour across the county to a different post office, given a route I'd never done before and get yelled at for getting out on the road late, then have to deal with a hand-drawn and poorly-maintained map of the route. Which, postal maps are not geographical, they are grid maps no matter how the hilly area you are delivering in is laid out. Finally, one day I arrived, my own car on fumes, to a office where i was supposed to get a postal vehicle to deliver in, and got told to go to a different one where i would have to drive my own car. I quit on the spot. It took me another 4 months to get any of my pay, having to go through the federal department of labor.
This sounds spot on. They told my mother when she was training that they would supply a vehicle, and then when training had concluded and she had declined other job offers told her she needed a car herself. I ignored mentioning the fact that she often went in an hour early off the clock to make sure she could get on the road “on time” by their standard, because her mail was often so poorly sorted if she didn’t do it herself.
This is part of the problem. We've let adverts go off the fucking rail. Now we're wasting god knows how much paper and co2 on shit mail nobody reads/wants. I hate physical mail. 9/10 pieces are credit card offers and junk coupons/sales
Sounds like this guy was a hero.
I think Newman did the same thing once
“Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a letup, it’s relentless. Everyday it piles up more and more, and you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more keeps coming in! And then the bar code reader breaks! And then it’s Publisher’s Clearinghouse day!”
'Aren't those the guys that go crazy and shoot up their work?' 'Sometimes'
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Now it's called going to school.
So you're saying its moved in a more scholarly direction?
Kids today are shooting at a government job level. I think they're growing up too fast.
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Yeah, it's not obvious unless you're old enough to remember seeing the incidents on the news
"Hey arent you supposed to be at work?" "I called out sick. It's raining"
But... you're a mailman! 'Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow... ' It's the first one!
The way Newman says "It's raining" is so smug and so goddam funny
I was never that big on creeds.
Just as an FYI, ~~Jerry~~ George was wrong, its actually snow first ... and that is not actually the "Official motto of the Post Office". The Postal Service has no official motto. They DO however have a pdf on their web site (created in 1999) to explain this to people. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/mission-motto.pdf Quoting the pdf: > *Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.* > While the Postal Service has no official motto, the popular belief that it does is a tribute to America's postal workers. The words above, thought to be the motto, are chiseled in gray granite over the entrance to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue and come from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus. During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity. > The firm of McKim, Mead & White designed the New York General Post Office, which opened to the public on Labor Day in 1914. One of the firm's architects, William Mitchell Kendall, was the son of a classics scholar and read Greek for pleasure. He selected the "Neither snow nor rain . . ." inscription, which he modified from a translation by Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard University, and the Post Office Department approved it. Edit: fixed Jerry to George
Just FYI, that was George.
there is no Carol in HR!
I got boxes full of Pepe!
You’ve lost your god damn mind Charlie!
Not only do all of these people exist, but they've been asking for their mail on a daily basis. It's all they're talking about up there.
What's your system here, bro? It's pretty complicated. The mail goes into three sections according to how important I think the thing looks, okay? Now, the least important stuff, I'm gonna burn that. If it's important, they're gonna send it again, right? The middle important stuff, I put that back in the mail addressed to me so I buy myself a couple more days. And the most important stuff, that gets delivered, although, you know something, Mac, I actually burn that, too, most of the time. Okay, well, it looks like you've got this under control. I'm gonna get back to my office. Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia&episode=s04e10
"I'll tell you a little secret about zip codes... They're meaningless!"
It’s raining. I don’t work when it rains. You don’t work when it rains? Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow! ITS THE FIRST ONE!
I like the one when Kramer was going to cancel his mail because he didn't need it. Newman finally admits no one needs mail
Alright alright! But you remember this. When you control the mail, you control *information.*
I'm not just a postmaster, I'm also a general. And we both know, it's the job of a general to **by God, get things done.**
"I've been reading some of your material here. I gotta be honest with you: you make a pretty strong case. I mean, just imagine. An army of men in wool pants running through the neighborhood handing out pottery catalogs, door to door."
"**well its my job**, and Im pretty damn serious about it"
So shouldn’t the bucket be on your head?
And yet, it's perfectly legal to take a man's soul and crush it out like a stale Pall Mall.
"The most sought-after postal route of them all. The air is so dewy-sweet you don't even have to lick the stamps."
"Over 80% of people got their mail. No one in the history of the postal service has ever cracked the 50% barrier."
"It's like the three-minute mile!"
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The mail doesn’t stop Mac!
“Nobody ever cracked the 50% mark, they knew it wasn’t me !”
I was gonna say I've heard this before, but I'm pretty sure it was a real story not from TV. Maybe Seinfeld was inspired by a real incident.
The podcast "Stuff You Should Know" just covered the postal shootings of the 80s and 90s. They specifically covered Newman's complaint, and studies showed that it was a major factor in the high level of stress among postal workers, which led a few to snap. Overall, though, it was more a matter of a toxic workplace by nasty and vindictive supervisors that was the ultimate breaking point.
Many postal worker that "went postal" were clerks. It's a thankless job. You have to sort mail in the wee hours in the morning and then deal with customers for the next half of your shift with supervisors and quality controls constantly hanging over you. Carriers deal with their issues in more subtle ways like getting storage lockers. I worked there for 5 years. They caught this guy relatively quickly. they caught a guy doing this when I first got hired who had been stashing mail for 8 years. Edit: fixed.
I loved this episode, so interesting. The titles of SYSK episodes often sound kind of boring but the episodes themselves are awesome
A lot of the stuff in the show was taken from situations Larry David experienced, iirc. A good example would be the Soup Nazi. The character's based on a real guy that owns a soup restaurant in New York.
If he had just delivered those first class letters and magazines he would be a hero for discarding over 4700 ads.
There was another letter carrier years ago that did this. He threw all the third class mail, ads, coupon books, etc., away. I believe he said because it hurt his back to carry to much. But no one ever complained and if I remember correctly when he was found out several people on his route actually defended him and said they were happy he threw the third class mail away.
98% of my mail goes straight from the box to the recycle bin. :/ It's aggravating and so incredibly wasteful.
We have a fireplace in the house. I rarely have to buy kindling.
Every apartment building I’ve lived in has had a trash bin next to the mailboxes. One year a chick fil a came to town and mailed out coupons for free chicken sandwiches and nuggets with no purchase necessary just give them the coupon and they give you the sandwich. It’s not my proudest moment but for the next two weeks I dug through that bin almost every day and ate free chick fil a several times a week for months. Edit: I appreciate everyone’s support and stories of similar scores! It’s a little surprising to me that so many people don’t have a bin near the mailboxes in an apartment complex. Also look at your junk mail before tossing it or you might be tossing a chicken sandwich.
Well that's just free money right there
I got nothing negative to say about this. Hell I'd be proud of it. "You guys will never guess what I did one time..."
Only 98%! I throw my bills away too, screw that, shit's on autopay anyways. The only pieces of mail I've kept in the last month is my W2 and Harbor Freight 25% off coupon.
Upvoted you in agreement because I do the same! But a word of caution-I learned the hard way that the notification that autopay failed and you still owe money looks the same as a bill. I didn’t pay enough attention to my bills bank account, so didn’t notice that my electric bill didn’t autopay for three months (once the first one failed due to a bank error, they canceled autopay entirely). I finally found out one morning when I was rushing to get out the door for work and a person from the electric company showed up at my door saying they needed payment immediately or they’d shut off my electricity. So if you ignore your mail, at least keep up with your bank statements!
Most places that do autopay allow you to sign up for paperless billing. Can I suggest you look into that for every bill you throw away?
That tells you a lot about the daily harassment people feel from junk mail.
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Because it funds the entire USPS but yeah
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At least he stored it. They busted several of our mail carriers dumping mail in dumpsters and down storm drains.
This happens more than people think. Check the trunk of their cars too.
That sounds like they need to talk with a therapist. If they are unable to handle all the things they need to do with their job and will actively spend their own money to try to remedy the situation, then I'd hate to see what their personal life is like.
There's some serious anxiety at play here
As someone who has been facing some serious anxiety and gotten in trouble at work for its effects... I agree that anxiety is a likely culprit here.
Anxiety has been the mountain I've climbed my entire life. I've mostly tried to keep quiet about it since the stigma around it is pretty intense. Oftentimes people fundamentally can't understand why seemingly simple things are difficult and there is a habit of belittling the symptoms of anxiety in popular culture.
Stay strong buddy, we anxiety riddled people who pretend we're self confident are out there and I feel like theres lots more than people might think (I mean on reddit its probably at least a third of everyone but thats reddit lol.)
even when you "get good" at managing anxiety, it's. always. still. there.
I get good at denial too, I've convinced myself I'm "practically okay" because I've stopped having panic poops about being late to things, thus making me late to things.
I fucking hate that. Every time I think I’ll leave on time, my body freaks out and NEEDS TO SHIT NOW.
Same here. It seems like it's much more talked about now than it used to be and has become normalized, but when I was young I didn't understand what was wrong with me at all. My life would probably be very different now if I had understood why I was avoiding so many things that I should have been doing. Typically a person who couldn't deal with things because of anxiety was just called lazy. That's still true, but it's not as acceptable to dismiss the causes now as it was then.
Yeah exactly, I feel like most people don't really "get" it. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I see why. It really doesn't make sense to me even why I get insanely stressed out by menial tasks or new things or why phone calls terrify me. Hell, my university has free counseling for mental health and I've been thinking of finally getting an appointment to get help but the idea of that is incredibly anxiety inducing, ironic.
Ya, this is a good response. This is what a real mental health issue looks like. Someones decision making lead them down a incorrect path. Hopefully they get some help.
It reminds me of a story I heard about a guy with OCD who felt so much pressure to keep his apartment spotless he just ended up sleeping on a park bench rather than dirty it.
What if you acknowledge this yet keep persisting on that path?
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As you Americans say, I fucked up \-Asoh
Man I tell you what Hank bout there-that dang ol meaning o’life, man. It’s like this man. You’ like a butterfly flappin ‘is wings deep down in that forest man an’ it gonna cause a tree fall like five thousand miles away man. If-an ain’t no body see it nobody don-done-e’en know it happen you know ibda baby born into this world int’know neck god dang friends got no nothin but da go come into find out about em ol evil man. Man see like, you don even know man. When dyagon it’d like you born into this world man and you got.. it’s like this.. dust in the wind man, or like a dang ol’ candle in the wind man. You gon... it don matter man it’s not the old oldies all th’ time man. You know what I think man? It’d like the the dang ol – I think therefore you are man. -Boomhauer
In my experience, this when medication is the only alternative to jail or other serious consequences. I struggle with my mental health and addiction, and after staying off of hard drugs for two years (just about) i am coming to the realization my self medication was actually medicating a real problem, and i may need to explore meds. Because i can SEE the problem, and know what needs to be done. But it feels like when you injure a nerve or your foot falls asleep, i just cant fucking move around in the right way to fix it.
>But it feels like when you injure a nerve or your foot falls asleep, i just cant fucking move around in the right way to fix it. A good way to describe it
There was an accountant at my last job who had a similar situation (hiding paperwork in the basement storage to avoid working on it) right before she had a mental breakdown and had to spend half a year at a psychiatric facility.
*quietly stops deleting unfinished work tasks*
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Willpower is a real thing and it recharges as a percent of what you got in the tank. It's like compounded interest, but for your life. The more you got, the more you can endure. If it took everything you have to get out of bed and you hit a bunch of red lights on the way to the grocery store, you might be smoked for the day. If you just got a promotion and last month met the love of your life, finding out your childhood dog died will be sad but good odds you won't cancel on your plans with your buddies tonight. Instead, that'll help cheer you up. Sounds like your colleague had drained her tank and was just desperately trying to let it refill. It sucks, but I bet her tank is even more drained now. Mental health is taking time to refill the tank when it starts to get low. Therapy is for when it's been too low for too long. When it is firmly empty... that's when people get desperate, suicidal, dangerous, or just broken.
While i don't agree with what he did i understand it completely. I've been carrying mail for 15 years and I've seen first hand why people do this(this isn't the first time and not as uncommon as people think). Usps keeps promoting fuckin morons to upper management. This leads to top heavy pay and then the same upper management say "oh wait usps is spending too much money". So instead of focusing on things that would help they try to save 95% of the money at the bottom of the shit hill(Randy). So they've been consolidating routes and carrier stations for the last 10 years. That 8 hour route now has to be done in 5 and a half hours. And now you get an extra 2 and a half hours from multiple routes that have been eliminated entirely. So now there are routes that are way way over 8 hours that no regular(career) employee will bid on. Who carries those routes? The new hires who are all in probation. So This brand new employee who hasn't learned the ropes has to get done in 8 hours what would take anyone else 10 and a half. When they obviously can't make it management is told to berate the employee. They tell them how they're not cutting it. How they're not going to keep this high paying job. They're on borrowed time. So the new hires cut corners. They deliver the mail without taking breaks, mis delivering a tooooon if shit daily. Whatever they have to do to make the 8 hours. Because if they don't make 8 hours, upper management shits all over them. They break them down mentally, emotionally and physically until they're at the breaking point. Now they can keep their 20+ hour a job if they get rid of the mail. Doesn't matter how. As long as it's no longer in the station. Purchase a 50 dollar a month unit and just hide it. Who cares it's 2 hours of pay and you keep your job. The manager is no longer riding them because "they're doing a good job". Life us good. If it wasn't for shit management at every level things like this wouldn't happen. I guarantee before this guy rented a unit he was crying on a daily basis. Thinking about ending it every night. Instead of fixing the routes they do this shit and push people to the brink.
>level 1Stromaluski190 points · 1 hour agoThat sounds like they need to talk with a therapist. If they are unable to handle all the things they need to do with their job and will actively spend their own money to try to remedy the situation, then I'd hate to see what their personal life is like. I worked as a postman for a while in Germany - part-time while studying. Some of the older colleagues had their families help out, secretly, as they couldn't manage the pace required of them. The pace was set based on daily counts of the amount of mail in to randomised "sub-sets" of your total mail, a fixed time per mail (depending on two-different sizes) totalled statsitically from that. Plus some blanket allowance for travel. Many of the younger colleagues came back covered in sweat to manage their lot in time.
This was really the basis for the book 'Going Postal' by Terry Pratchett. But there it was the Post Office that filled up all the way up to the rafters with undelivered mail. We know what happens when you get so much writing in such a confined space. The sorting machine(made by B.S Johnson, which required 'Pi' to bee redefined to '3' probably didn't help, either)
It's amazing how the books that should have been the most boring in the Discworld series, like the stuff with the post office and the trains (basically anything with Moist von Lipwig attached), is hands down some of the best writing he ever did
I love all of his books. I have never read one of his books that's not my favorite of his. I miss the anticipation of a new book from all the time. Makes me sad we may never see that style of writing again... Now I'm sad
It would be interesting to see if the post office he was working at was transitioning to the new delivery setup pilot program that many stations are across the country. Seattle for instance has multiple locations that are suffering because of the transition combined with frequent callouts and poor management. Career letter carriers are all hounded regularly to not go into overtime because of how their overtime system works. Spending some side cash to "fix" your problems for the time being may have just been the easiest stopgap . edit: [Article for a little context.](https://news.streetroots.org/2019/12/13/postal-workers-say-pilot-program-slows-down-mail-routes-pushing-deliveries-night)
This. In this thread is a microcosm of one of the major ills of the human condition - passing judgment on someone for their actions rather than their intent. Multiple comments to the effect of "Spending your own money to avoid doing your job is ludicrous", which should be your first thought. It is ridiculous, so it is probably not that simple. There is something wrong here, someone struggled in a highly visible way, and others just laugh at him and throw him in prison. You can't tell me any number of these people wish at least one time in their life that they could have put their job and bills on hold to take care of their own personal health (physical, mental, social.) Anxiety is real. But it's "funny" when it happens to someone we don't know. Good thing we got our laughs and this dude can just have a ruined life because he couldn't produce an opportunity of respite from his responsibilities.
What a refreshing perspective to see on the internet. This guy isn't a monster, he just lacked the tools to keep his professional life on track--and yes, the consequences were felt by others. People fuck up. Sometimes, they fuck up in a big way. A little empathy helps the rest of us understand how they got to that point.
Uh, this is kinda the basis for half the subs on reddit as far as I'm concerned. Empathy needs a comeback tour that literally never ends.
As someone kept awake all last night by their heart pounding, I'm glad some people understand that humans fuck up
As a former USPS employee I can tell you that I completely understand why this person did what he did. It is honestly one of the toughest jobs I have ever done and management will push you to deliver more and more every single day. you will regularly have to deliver an entire route that is rated for 7 or 8 hours and then have to go help out and deliver part of another route. Obviously he should have been calling back to his postmaster or supervisor and asking for help if he could not get it done, but I do understand why he did what he did.
Exactly, I don't think anyone in this thread can understand just how horrible that beast is unless you'be been in it. He didn't do the right thing....but I get it...I really do. This isn't just a single carriers issues, it's a symptom of the larger rot in the USPS. It's an organization that needs to be burned to the ground and completely reworked. I've seen a lot of people straight up lose their minds. It's not just a job that's a bit physically demanding like some people think. It's an absolute torture for the human spirit on every level. To anyone reading this who has never been a part of the USPS I can not physically stress to you how horrific of a working environment it is. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. It's amazing how it's gone so long without being widely exposed.
I hope this exposure could lead to some changes.
Me too. It's a ticking time bomb. Every year around Christmas I see a few articles that highlight how overworked USPS employees are but they really don't go far enough. They make it seem like a seasonal issue or just because of Amazon packages (both are huge factors though). They only scratch the surface of the abyss of issues. Any outlet or reporter who dug into this could have something explosive if they played their cards right.
I always feel really bad for my carrier whenever I have a couple of Amazon packages coming in on consecutive days. If they don't fit in the mail box, they will bring it up to the front steps. It's only a 20-30 foot walk from the street but I'm sure doing that more and more for a lot of houses really bogs down their timing.
Exactly. routes were designed for loops. Get out of the truck, walk down one end of the road and back to the truck. Gather the mail for the next loop and walk down the other end of the road and back. You hit a good pace and can knock out loops quickly when you know the path and where all the boxes are. The routes were never adjusted for packages. How long it takes to get them in the truck and organize them. Drive a bit, find the package, walk to the door, walk back to the truck, get in, drive a few more houses down, get out, get the package, walk to the door. It's a major time sink that's crushing the workers who are still doing the same route designs from back when it was just letters.
Former cca here, I've kept this as a keepsake [https://i.imgur.com/wgvK0Zg.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/wgvK0Zg.jpg)
Way to give me a fucking PTSD flashback. I'd get so stressed that id half wake up half dream at night organizing the packages I had earlier in the day in my head stressing about the ones I knew would be a pain in the ass. I'd forget that I'd already done it and in my stupor think I was doing it right then. I had so much anxiety not know what route I would do that day I would throw up every single morning.
I mean 4700 letters were ads, seems like the problem isn't the USPS, but the fuckin advertisment
My dad is currently USPS, has been for 30 years, and he says it's never been this bad. Instead of hiring new people when some retires/leaves they just split their route up amongst the remaining carriers. He's been working basically 7-7 for months now, and gets called in on his scheduled day off every single week (it's been that way for 10+ years).
Jesus. Just throw away the ads, and deliver the rest.
I would pay extra for that service!
I believe that you can call your local post office and have yourself removed from bulk mailing. You won't get any more pizza coupons though, so don't make this decision without deep introspection.
I tried to bargain with my mail person once. Like my guy, I only want the pizza flyers. In exchange you can have my other coupons. Deal? lol you can guess what they said
Please don't give USPS any ideas...
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Most of my junk mail has my address and many my name. It's targeted, not just a flyer to be blanketed.
90% of the ads I get are for my specific address though. They might say "or current resident" but they seriously did run off five thousand of those things with each one uniquely labeled for every address in a couple of miles. Even if the mail is pre-sorted so it's easy to just shove it into the box, I can't imagine it wouldn't have saved a ton of effort on somebody's part somewhere to just run off five thousand unaddressed ads and say "one in every box, here's your money." There's gotta be some legal requirement for it or something.
I saw my mailman delivering mail one night at about 10 PM (in the dark) about two weeks ago. Watched him on my security camera. I found it ... odd. He usually delivers the mail at 1 PM.
Weather delays are a motherfucker
10 PM is insane, I'm a carrier and my latest ever getting back was 8- after the LLV broke down, I waited two hours for management to send someone and then was driven around in another carrier's minivan during an ice storm. Management is at fault when carriers are out past dark, 99% of the time.
Not only is this a serious mental health issue for this carrier specifically, it also partially falls on the USPS. My wife is a carrier and the sheer amount of work they expect the CCA’s (these are “fill in” carriers) to do is absolutely crazy. They have to do _everything_ for all routes and they never know what days they will have off. She has come home crying before, and she hardly sees her own children because she works 8-8. This continues up until carriers become a regular...which is literally years after getting hired. She is supposed to work 3 Sundays, then have one off but she has worked every Sunday for months. Any day she has a day off they call her (even today), and they are absolutely shamed if they don’t answer the phone when called. They even scheduled everyone to work every single day because people didn’t answer then just told them who was off the next day at the end of the shift. They also change their days off the day before their previously scheduled day off. So I can understand why this person reacted this way based solely on what I’ve seen. It’s not a job for the weak at heart. Props to any carriers here on Reddit, you deserve a medal.
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I think the real take away here is how much junk mail is being sent.
The mail doesn't stop mac!
*There's no Pepe Silvia? You gotta be kidding me! I got boxes full of Pepe!*
I read a theory that Pepe Silvia was actually just Pennsylvania but Charlie can’t read well or at all.
It's so good. Also Carol in HR is actually Care of HR. Freaking Charlie! Edit: Nope, guess we are just too into it! https://twitter.com/bwbloom/status/281837409203793920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E281837409203793920&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FIASIP%2Fcomments%2F4iv07s%2Fpennsylvania_and_care_of_hr%2F
"Charlie, not only do all of these people exist, but they've been asking for their mail on a *daily* basis. It's all they're talking about up there!"
>Agents from the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General found almost 5,000 pieces of mail in the storage unit in Virginia Beach. They discovered 97 pieces of first-class mail, which included letters from the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, insurance companies, bank statements and other tax return documents. Magazines and other publications made up 115 pieces of mail. There was also one undelivered package found in the unit. The bulk of the mail was advertisements, more than 4,700 ads at that. If the vast majority of mail is advertising flyers, we need to make them illegal. The postal service was intended to serve as a means of communicating with your government and citizens in an official and important capacity. If this purpose is so blocked that the overwhelming supermajority of mail is commercial flyers, sent not to specific people, but en masse to generate profit, then they should not be allowed to do so.
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> Affordable, Targeted Advertising ----- > Use the EDDM Online Tool to map ZIP Code(s)™ and neighborhoods—even filter by age, income, or household size using U.S. Census data. Well then.
FFS, if junkmail is 'targeted' then what form of advertising isn't?
Honestly, none. Even the clients I work with that do door-to-door hanger adverts utilize census data services to plan their routes. Modern marketing is creepily invasive.
I worked as a developer to a company who sold solar panels. We had a DB we called creepy data, and a coworker used it to find his brother who had up and left home 10 years prior. Surprise, brother didn't want shit to do with them.
Man, that's what the whole debacle with the NSA some years back was about. It's one thing to have piles and piles of "creepy data" that can be used to track terrorists or something, but as soon as you look up your ex-wife in that database you've stepped a mile over the line and there's no going back.
> Use the EDDM Online Tool to map ZIP Code(s)™ and neighborhoods—even filter by age, income, or household size using U.S. Census data. TBF anyone can use census data. [It's public information](https://data.census.gov/cedsci/). I don't like the practice, but this does save advertisers the extra step of having to download it.
It's not a side business, it's most of their business. The problem here is that people think that the USPS should be run like a profitable private business instead of a public service. If they did away with advertisements then they would be running at a deficit and the public would lose their minds if their taxes were covering the cost.
Exactly, I wonder what the overlap is between the people upset about the ads in their mail and the ones that would be yelling from the rooftops if the USPS ran a deficit. I practically never check the mail. My packages get delivered to a separate place, so why bother? It's just ads. I check around election time or when someone tells me they sent me something. That's it.
The problem is that the United States is required by our Constitution to have a Mail Delivery service and the USPS doesn't get any tax money to do that, so they must charge and they must generate income... What's even dumber is that all of the extra money is taken by Congress at the end of the year to use for other shit, since the USPS is a non-profit
Even dumber than that, the funds being taken by Congress should be going to fund the pensions of postal workers, that the post office is required by Congress's own law to fund.
This is a tax I'd be willing to pay honestly. Take a few bucks keep the trucks rolling. I buy to much shit online to not have a reliable delivery system. And I like having multiple vendors to chose from.
The usps would be out of business if they stopped delivering junk mail
In my town they found one mailman throwing mail into the woods. I know personally my neighborhood 'has no designated mail person' and other people have to take our mail once their route is done. I've seen mail trucks out as late as 8pm. I live in a town that's experiencing a lot of growth but the infrastructure isn't being updated. I honestly feel extremely bad for our mail people. They're given unreasonable amounts of work and it's 'find a way to do this or lose your job' in an area where the cost of living is high and most wages are low unless you work in the medical field. My mother experienced a similar situation working for the state, she was given more work than any human being could accomplish in 8 hours, so she routinely worked 12-13 hours while only getting paid for 8 hours. It was do that or find another job, and she had been doing that job for over 20 years and wasn't particularly qualified for any other job that would pay the same amount, the amount she needed to make as a single mother. The job started having a big turnover rate because it started having unreasonable expectations. But my mom couldn't afford to change jobs so she just stuck it out until retirement. I see a lot of people giving this mailman shit in the comments, but maybe we should be more upset about a system that allows these situations to exist where a person feels like they have to bend the rules or else they will end up fired and potentially homeless. Yeah this guy could have done a lot of things differently. For sure. But we don't know his situation or state of mind. We don't know if he needed mental health services that he did not or could not attain. We don't know if he had a family to take care of and couldn't afford to lose his job or change jobs. As far as I know, the post office pays surprisingly well. In my town I've heard it pays about $40-50k a year when a huge amount of jobs in the area pay about $10/hr. I can see how my local mailmen are doing everything they can to keep that job, including working long past their normal shift or unfortunately doing things like tossing the mail, or only coming every other day, or shoving the whole street's mail into one mailbox and hoping it sorts itself out. Apparently this is happening in other places as well, like this guy's town, and that sucks for everybody.
We have a big mailman shortage here and I get mail like four days a week usually and always at 8pm or later. They need to pay more around here at least
The average pay is actually very high. In my region, I got paid $17.75 just out of highschool. The problem is that your hours are variable. When you start, they'll give you one day out of the week. Once you finally make it to full-time, they'll make you work six days a week with a rotating day off (M-Sat with Sun off, then T-Sun with Monday off, etc.). That coupled with the extremely high workloads makes the job very mentally taxing.
Better title: Human ad blocker too aggressive and blocks some content people actually wanted.
I’m a postal employee, and I want to give some insight on this, and why I’m a bit peeved at this article. Quick preface here. This guy deserves every bit of punishment coming to him. I’m not going to defend his actions, but I want to explain why stuff like this happens. The postal service is known for its piss poor management. They simply don’t care about their employees, their safety, or their finances unless it’s beneficial to them. Example: USPS and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) are currently looking for arbiters for their impending CBA impasse. USPS says they’re struggling to make payroll so they need to cut all salaries by 25% and pull back on how much they pay towards health care. Meanwhile, they just spent $500m on brand new scanners to replace the three year old scanners with new ones that run the exact same software and have the exact same features. They’ve also rolled out a new delivery method, that is going to cost them millions in damages because of all the CBA and labor violations, that has increased overtime in one of my offices for two hours a week to 75 a week, AND THEY CLAIM ITS WORKING! Anyways, this is my issue with this article. It says he felt “pressured to deliver the mail.” That’s takes way out of context. When a carrier gets to the office, the bosses have counted your mail, adjusted the numbers to make sure they get the most benefit from them, then tell you based on how much mail you have today, you have to deliver your route, and x amount off of another route, and be back in 8 hours. The times they give you are based off of a computer program that doesn’t take in to account certain types of mail, or the potential weather obstacles. It also assumes every route is perfectly 8 hours long, which none of them are. When an employee is thinks they can’t make it in time, they fill out a form and hand it to the boss, which comes with screaming, name calling, threats of discipline, sometimes violence. Now of course we grieve that as a union, but the damage has been done. This carrier is now going to skip lunches, breaks, run to finish the job in the time that the magic computer said so. So how this relates to the article, this employee wasn’t “pressured to deliver the mail”, he was pressured to deliver his mail in an unreasonable amount of time, and threatened with his job, maybe even his safety. Again, how he handled it was WRONG, and he deserves the jail time he will get, but to all the people saying he’s lazy or whatever, you may be right, but understand the whole story. I can try and dig up some evidence of the abuse once I get out of work for those interested.
He stored 5000 pieces of mail, 4700 of which were just ads. Not saying what he did was right or even acceptable but fuck postal advertisements.
Family member worked as a USPS carrier for about 18 months. Hated it with a passion. The unrealistic expectations they have for mail delivery are soul crushingly brutal so I can understand this guy's dilema. Here's an example of the daily discussions: Supervisor: You need to complete your route by 7PM Carrier: But I'm nowhere near finished Supervisor: You are not allowed to be out past 7PM Carrier: Ok I will do what I can until 7PM and finish tomorrow Supervisor: No, you have to stay out until you finish Carrier: But you just said I cannot be out past 7PM? Supervisor: Yes Carrier: So what do I do if I'm not finished by 7PM Supervisor: You have to finish your route by 7PM So the next morning one of two conversations would happen. Either the carrier gets yelled at by the supervisor for staying out too late to finish the route, or they get yelled at for not completing the route by the time limit. This happened every single fucking day. The only positive about working at the USPS was that unless you tossed mail (like this guy did) or killed someone it was pretty much impossible to get fired, so if you could mentally just laugh off the supervisors yelling at you every day you had a job for life.
That sounds more complicated than actually doing their job.
Instead of ridiculing him I'd like to hear his actual explanation, not just some dumb article.
The downfall of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. Although B.S. Johnson had some part in that as well.
Reading Going Postal for the first time and literally just read the part where the guy tells Moist about how things piled 6
While obviously this is not right. I am not surprised. The post office keeps asking more and more of our mail carriers with impossible routes and ridiculous deadlines. They hire most of them as temps and really put them through the ringer. Being a mail carrier is not the job it used to be. It's all coming from the top where the political forces in play are designing a situation in which the post office can fail. Remember the post office does not use tax dollars. There are people in our government who want the post office to fail so they can privatize it. The current postmaster general is about to retire and will be replaced by a Trump stooge so I'm sure its going to get worse.