It’s Friday!

That’s assuming you’re reading this on the day this newsletter appears in your email and posts on my website. I’m actually writing this week’s newsletter a few days in advance. So I’m taking advantage of the extra time to write –

Tips from a Mail Carrier (in No Particular Order) –

Keep your dog inside during delivery hours.
The rule is: do not deliver if a dog is in the yard. Ever. Even if you know the dog and you’re sure it’s a big cuddlewumpus. When I started as a mail carrier I went into yards and onto porches regardless of the appearance of a dog. I was going to make sure the mail got through – no matter what! With the passing of time, and my body telling me that not everything that breaks ever really heals, I’m less determined. We’ve had quite a few carriers getting bitten while delivering and I’ve had to fend off a few with my mail bag. I will still go into yards if the dog doesn’t bark and it wiggles while its tail wags. Those dogs are only dangerous from being overly friendly.

Include your apartment/unit number in all your correspondence.
Every time you fill out a form, every time you write your return address, every time you order something. Your regular mail carrier might recognize your name and figure out in which box to place your mail or which door to deliver your parcel. But if you’ve just moved into your building, chances are your carrier will mark the item IA (insufficient address) and send it back. The carriers who fill in on your regular carrier’s day off might set mail aside for the regular carrier to figure out or they might mark the items IA and send them back.

When moving, fill out a change of address for every person and every variation of the names of the people that are moving.
I know that seems like a pain in the ass but I often get mail for people that’s being sent to their maiden names. That mail won’t get forwarded. If your last name has weird spellings, fill out COAs for those spellings too.

Collect your mail at least once a week.
Your carrier can only jam so much mail into your box. Have a heart. Clear out your mail frequently. Even if all you expect is “junk”. If your mail box doesn’t lock, clear it out daily. We’re getting more people stealing mail these days. An unlocked box will get cleared out by a thief if you don’t clear it out yourself.

Have an obvious place to hide parcels.
Porch pirates abound. If a parcel is easily seen from the street it’s tempting prey for the nefariously minded. I stash parcels behind furniture and planters when I can but if there’s nothing on a porch your carrier will have nothing to use for concealment. A lot of my customers have large containers specifically so I and UPS and FedEx and Amazon and anyone else can put deliveries out of sight.

You do not have to sign for certified mail if you don’t want to.
My least favorite type of delivery is a certified letter. Partly because it requires me to spend extra time either getting a signature or, if the customer is not there, spend extra time to fill out a form to let the customer know that a certified letter is waiting for them at the post office. Partly because an awful lot of certified letters are bad news – divorce papers, collection notices and other legal threats. I hate delivering bad news and I hate asking people to legally acknowledge that they have received said bad news. A lot of people don’t realize that they can refuse to sign for certified mail. Refusing to sign won’t stop legal proceedings but it may slow things down a bit. (Also, these days, a lot of people just aren’t ready for visitors. They come to door in their pajamas or their underwear or sometimes just wearing nothing.)

“Informed Delivery” is an inaccurate gage for receiving your mail.
“Informed Delivery” is a service whereby the customer gets photos of the mail that is supposedly going to be delivered in the next day or so. The trouble is, those photos are being taken as the mail is being processed at the plant. That letter could be get missorted or just plain lost before the carrier gets in their daily trays of mail to be delivered. This happens far more often than we’d like and it’s been happening more frequently since the current Postmaster General had sorting machines removed from a lot of our processing plants. Also, the program that sends those photos to the customer is not the same program that is sorting the mail. I discovered this when a customer asked about an important letter that ID had told her she would be receiving “shortly”. Thing is, that letter had the wrong zip code on it. ID somehow knew to send her the photo of the letter but the sorting software sent the actual letter to another post office in another zip code and a human being had to make the corrections to get the letter to me to get it to my customer.

Recycle your junk mail please.
This note is directed to the folks who live in apartments who put their unwanted catalogs, solicitations and, especially, Red Plums on top of their buildings CBUs (cluster box units). I like to keep the mail area neat and if I find that stuff on top of the CBU I will put it back in your mailbox.

“Resident” is you.
If the letter (or anything else) is addressed to resident anywhere on the label it’s meant for the person living at the address. It doesn’t matter if it also has the name of a previous resident in the address, you’re the current resident. Your mail carrier doesn’t want it back.

It’s not the “Wrong Address” if the address is your address.
I understand the thinking. You get a letter with the name of a stranger on it. Obviously that’s the wrong address for that person. But, if the rest of the address is correct, it’s not the wrong address. That person is NATA (not at this address). This is me being pedantic. I do appreciate people trying to help mail get to the correct person.

You can opt out of the Red Plum.
I hate delivering the thing even more than my customers hate getting it. That most of my customers hate is one of the reasons I hate it. If I had more customers who expressed a want for the thing I’d have more fondness for it. If you’re a person who hates the thing, you can opt out for five years. Use this link. It will take a few weeks for your address to be removed and you might still get a Red Plum now and then if the carrier isn’t looking closely at the addresses when delivering but you will get the thing a lot less frequently.

Mail carriers do not have keys to individual mailboxes.
I regularly run into this with customers who have individual locking mailboxes for the first time. They put outgoing mail in the box and put the flag up expecting the carrier to collect it. Every couple months I have to leave someone a note informing them that I need them to put the mail where I can grab it – usually on a clip on the inside of the door or lid of the box. Carriers do have keys that will let them enter buildings and open the fronts/sides/backs of CBUs but we’d never be able to carry all the keys we’d need if we opened each box individually.

If you want to read pet peeves from mail carriers – here’s a reddit thread. It will either have you sympathize with carriers or think a lot of them are assholes. Probably both.

These Days …

I did our taxes. With Skookworks now a business this is probably the last time I’ll be doing them on my own. Supposedly we’ll get a refund. The exact amount will probably not be the amount the forms suggested. It hasn’t been for the last few years. And the refund, whatever it turns out to be, might not arrive for months. Last year I filed at the beginning of April and the money took ’til midsummer to arrive.

Work continues on Billi 99. I reached out to the production folks at the company that’s planning to publish the trade paperback after the Kickstarter hardback is out. I got some good advice and a little useful critique of what I’ve done so far.

Enough Words … Have Some Pictures!

I’m on vacation this week. The tips at the beginning of this issue are the only postal work I’m doing. I took a few minutes to do some sketching. Thirty two faces.

That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve had some more good times than bad in the last week. I hope you have even more in the upcoming seven days.

See you next week!