Packages

With the Christmas season, a new headache has emerged at the Post Office: the deluge of packages. Mind you, it is a good thing business wise for the Post Office but, for the mail carrier, packages can be a royal pain. The Christmas season sees their package load double to quadruple in volume. This creates problems as the packages take up lots of space in their mail trucks which aren't super big to begin with. They also slow down the carrier as they have to organize the packages, stop their truck at the delivery address, may have to scan the package if someone paid for delivery confirmation and, collect a signature of the package is insured. If the carrier can't get the required signature, the carrier has to take the package back to the Post Office and drop it off in a section for packages going over to the regular Post Office. Later, someone will load up all the those packages and take them over to the regular Post Office so their owners can pick them up.

One thing the Post Office will do to make things easier on their carriers is have one or two substitute carriers (subs) do package delivery. The subs will take almost all the carrier's packages and make a package only run. Yesterday, I did such a run. I ended delivering over 50 packages during the morning. It's a huge help for the regular carriers. It also has a side benefit for the Post Office in that it can help teach the subs new areas of their city. There are parts of Laurel I've never had need to visit. However, I need to know all parts of Laurel so if necessary, I can deliver mail in any part of it. Thanks to doing package runs, I've learned a number of areas in the western part of Laurel. Learning these new areas will help me when I do express mail runs. With express mail, you must deliver all your mail by noon. You need to know exactly where you're going as you don't have any time for mistakes. Conversely, with package runs, you're not under the time gun so you can make mistakes though you try not to. Thanks to doing package runs, I'll now be able to deliver express mail on time to parts of Western Laurel. The package runs have been a win-win as I've gotten some invaluable training and helped make things easier for the regular carriers.