There he is again , just like yesterday and last week and seven year ago . " Neither coke , nor rainwater , nor heat , nor sombreness of night " maintain your loyal letter carrier from making his day-by-day rounds in his powder - blue shirt , grey boxers and occasionalawesome safari chapeau . But how on the button did your trusty mail toter get assigned this specific route , and how long is he or she stuck with it ?
According to Sue Brennan at theUnited States Postal Service , your mail carrier ’s itinerary is one of more than 74,000 rural postal routes and nearly 145,000 urban center itinerary across the res publica . The longest single road in America is in Mangum , Oklahoma , where a well - traveled rural letter carrier take 182.75 stat mi ( 294 klick ) a sidereal day to serve 248 customers . The shortest route is in Athens , Georgia , where a city carrier take the air 950 feet ( 289 meters ) to make 281 deliveries .
Brian Renfroe is a 2d - coevals letter carrier from Hattiesburg , Mississippi , presently serving as executive vice chair of theNational Association of Letter Carriers , a confinement union representing America ’s 200,000 city postal prole . Renfroe was happy to explain the process by which an private postal route is designed and assigned .
For crank , Renfroe says , rural carrier and city carriers have different systems for determining the size of a route . A rural immune carrier ’s route is much more consistent , and he or she is pay off for the amount of prison term it takes to discharge the route . For city carriers , the guide rationale of route purpose is for a carrier to complete the route in as closemouthed to eight hours as possible .
As you could imagine , an eight - 60 minutes route looks a lot different depending on your placement . In a dense urban essence full of high - rise apartments , it might take a postal worker eight hour to service a couple of blocks . Out in the suburbs , another postal worker might walk and drive miles delivering to hundreds of single - family line place .
The size and dimensions of each road are direct using a combination of computer - establish single-valued function software and old - fashioned , on - the - ground experience .
" The Postal Service has a information processing system computer programme that maps the exact location of every delivery point . Not just ' this business firm is here , ' but where the mailbox is , " says Renfroe . " And this program uses a number of algorithm to attempt to generate the most effective way to journey the path based on the time value that ’s assigned to each street . "
The computer ’s timing of the path is just a start item . Then it ’s the postal director ’s problem to " describe for reality , " allege Renfroe , which include all the variable quantity that can impact the time it consume to complete a itinerary . There are seasonal fluctuations in chain mail volume . There ’s inclement weather . There ’s road mental synthesis and newfangled habitation expression and the very human deviation between one carrier and the next .
" Some missive carrier are tall , some are short , some are youthful , some are elderly , some are faster , some are tedious , " order Renfroe . " There are all sorts of variables that recreate into it . "
There ’s no set time to deliver mail at a particular house . The postal carrier has to spend a few 60 minutes sorting the chain armour into trays before channelise out on his or her route . The tray correspond to the society of the path . If the household forwards of you on the route fall out to be heavier on ring mail than usual on one day , the alphabetic character may get in your box later than on another day , even if the weather is right and there ’s no road construction or other delays .
keep the routes as close to eight hour as possible requires regular adjustments . Postal managers will conduct six - solar day route inspections to accurately clock each part of the letter aircraft carrier ’s twenty-four hour period , from the everyday morning sorting to the on - the - street rescue to hanging up the suitcase at night .
If a carrier ’s daylight is debase nigher to eight - and - a - half hour , the postal managing director will slice up off a portion of his or her path and divvy it up among nearby common carrier with clean loads . That explains why you might see a new face on your route every couple of years .
Otherwise , the assigning of routes at any afford postal service office is done by longevity . When a route is vacated — the carrier quit or crawl in — or a new one is created , all the carriers in the office get to entreat on the route . The carrier wave with the most seniority wins . If you ’ve had the same letter carrier for a long prison term , that credibly means you ’re part of a desirable route . Or those cooky you give him on National Postal Worker Day ( July 1 ) are paying off .
In add-on to the long - full term route adjustments that are made every few months or years , the Postal Service also get light - term path fix .
When letter carriers show up to study every morning , they look at the 24-hour interval ’s mail volume and make an estimation of how long it will take to complete their assigned route . Maybe it ’s a C. P. Snow mean solar day , or a day after a holiday when mail volume is double . If they sleep with it ’s going to take more than eight hours , they can either volunteer for overtime — overtime signups are every three months — or the supervisor can attribute a fate of the itinerary to other carriers for the day .
" It ’s in reality much more complicated than that , but that ’s a simplified means of explaining how it do work , " says Renfroe , mark that individual post power in big city like New York , Los Angeles or Boston might have 200 to 300 letter carriers to finagle .
