Am I the only one who misses the three missing car-side drop off mailboxes by the library?

Now if only we'd get a drive-up mailbox in Maplewood!

ebr95 said:
Now if only we'd get a drive-up mailbox in Maplewood!

 Trade you for a drive up ATM for Bank of America

I used to think that putting outgoing mail in the mail box was only for rural routes, in the type of mail box on a post with a flag that goes up.  But apparently anyone can send outgoing mail from their mail box, and it gets sent out with that days mail (in theory, at least, Maplewood does seem to live in its own world in terms of mail delivery).

If you have a wall mounted mail box, simply use a binder clip or clothes pin to hold the mail so the carrier can see it.  If you have a door slot, then I have no idea of how you would do it though.

Sadly the key to that is trusting the local mail.  I don't anymore.

spontaneous said:

If you have a wall mounted mail box, simply use a binder clip or clothes pin to hold the mail so the carrier can I just put my outgoing mail in the door slot under the metal flapsee it.  If you have a door slot, then I have no idea of how you would do it though.

 I just put my outgoing mail in the mail slot under the flap. My mail carrier (Michael who is the BEST) takes it out and slides the days mail into the front hall via the door slot

Sadly, my mail carrier is not as good.

spontaneous said:
I used to think that putting outgoing mail in the mail box was only for rural routes, in the type of mail box on a post with a flag that goes up.  But apparently anyone can send outgoing mail from their mail box, and it gets sent out with that days mail (in theory, at least, Maplewood does seem to live in its own world in terms of mail delivery).

If you have a wall mounted mail box, simply use a binder clip or clothes pin to hold the mail so the carrier can see it.  If you have a door slot, then I have no idea of how you would do it though.

 That's exactly what I do but we are planning soon to install a mail slot, so will lose that in favor of not having to worry about vacation mail or rain on our outside box.

sac said:
 That's exactly what I do but we are planning soon to install a mail slot, so will lose that in favor of not having to worry about vacation mail or rain on our outside box.

 I hope you have better luck than we do - our door has a mail slot cut into it and we often find mail left outside the slot, between the storm door and the door with the mail slot. For a while we had a wonderful mail carrier who always put it through, but he was promoted and the new people on the route are hit or miss. So we still have to stop our mail for vacations, or bother a neighbor to come over and put the mail through the slot.  

cody said:
 I hope you have better luck than we do - our door has a mail slot cut into it and we often find mail left outside the slot, between the storm door and the door with the mail slot. For a while we had a wonderful mail carrier who always put it through, but he was promoted and the new people on the route are hit or miss. So we still have to stop our mail for vacations, or bother a neighbor to come over and put the mail through the slot.  

 My grandmother’s cat viciously attacked her mail carrier by reaching outside the mail slot and scratching up the carrier.  It was bad enough that he refused to deliver any mail until my grandmother was able to devise a way to keep the cat from being able to reach the mail slot.  Looking at YouTube, my grandmother’s cat was not unique, there are some vicious kitties out there.  If your route has a lot of subs they may not know that your house doesn’t have a vicious cat waiting to take a chunk out of their hand, which might explain why they aren’t using it

spontaneous said:

cody said:
 I hope you have better luck than we do - our door has a mail slot cut into it and we often find mail left outside the slot, between the storm door and the door with the mail slot. For a while we had a wonderful mail carrier who always put it through, but he was promoted and the new people on the route are hit or miss. So we still have to stop our mail for vacations, or bother a neighbor to come over and put the mail through the slot.  

 My grandmother’s cat viciously attacked her mail carrier by reaching outside the mail slot and scratching up the carrier.  It was bad enough that he refused to deliver any mail until my grandmother was able to devise a way to keep the cat from being able to reach the mail slot.  Looking at YouTube, my grandmother’s cat was not unique, there are some vicious kitties out there.  If your route has a lot of subs they may not know that your house doesn’t have a vicious cat waiting to take a chunk out of their hand, which might explain why they aren’t using it

 Maybe we will have to put up a sign of some sort, but they'd better use it if we install it!

sac said:

 Maybe we will have to put up a sign of some sort, but they'd better use it if we install it!

 Make sure it is easily visible.  Like if you have a black door and the mail slot is painted black, subs will easily miss it and put the mail wherever.  Some other combinations can also be hard when they're looking quickly, like a burnished brass mail slot on a light oak door can be surprisingly easy to miss.  Every house that they have to hunt for a mail box costs them time, and they're literally timed by the minute.

I was a mail carrier very briefly recently.  It sucked.  The turnover rate for new employees in the post office is about 40%, which I believe they said is about double the national average.  But the turnover rate for the carrier position is 59.9%.  Basically, for every 10 carriers they hire today, 6 will quit before the year is up.  I was told people quit because of how physical the job is.  I had no problem whatsoever with the physical part, and I started right at the beginning of the winter so I was out there in the cold, sleet, icy sidewalks, etc.  Everything else though...  The official name of the position is City Carrier Assistant (CCA) and that is usually the sub you see when you don't recognize your mail carrier.  You can be sent to a different town, doing a different route, almost every day of the week.  And you're expected to deliver within a certain time frame, they don't care that you don't know the route.  People hide mail boxes, some literally have them on the back of the house, on the side, or just don't have one and expect you to know that they use the milk crate on the side of the porch because "the regular carrier knows."   Yeah, and the regular carrier is on vacation and your sub came from three towns over to cover for today, tomorrow's sub will be from halfway across the state.  At this house you go inside the front porch and put it on the table underneath the painted rock.  At that house you ignore the mail box on the wall because a bird built a nest in it and the resident wants you to use the second mailbox sitting on the steps.  Multi family houses have multiple boxes, none labeled, and you'll get bitched out when you return at the end of the route because Ms Jones is pissed that her mail was put in Ms Smith's mail box and called your supervisor to complain.  It all adds up when it comes to time, and every single minute counts.  And I do mean literally every minute, the scanner the CCA carries is sending their location every sixty seconds AND streets are timed to the minute, you're given 27 minutes for this street, 43 minutes for that one, so on and so on, so losing 30 seconds here, and 20 seconds there trying to find boxes and mail slots can be very frustrating for a carrier who knows they're being watched and judged based on their time for a route they're not familiar with.  I was literally told I could be sent anywhere from Phillipsburg to Fort Lee, different town, different route, every day.  I was expected to be on-call for 360 days, though there is no on-call pay, you only get paid once you punch in.  The only guaranteed days off were the five days at the end of the year after being on call for 360 days straight.  I often worked 9-11 days in a row, no days off, walking 12+ miles a day.  I was lucky though, some busy offices had CCAs working 20+ days in a row with no days off.  I didn't mind the physical part so much, but at the end of a work day I didn't have a lot of energy to get chores done so it all had to wait until a day I wasn't working and I would play catch up.  Not having at least one day off a week left me with little time to catch up on stuff at home.  More than a few times I was punching out for the day and was not scheduled for the next day, and my supervisor would catch me walking out the door and say "Change of plans, you're in Belvidere/Dover/Mt Arlington/Timbuktu tomorrow."  I literally could not plan to do anything that needed concrete plans.  In my home office I was shown a route once, and then expected to do that route in the same time as the regular (who had 20+ years experience) on my second solo run.  It took me a week of doing the route, skipping my lunch and my two 10 minute breaks, to make the same time as the regular.  The other carriers thought I was doing great making time in a week, but management didn't agree.  I was chewed out for not meeting expectations because it took me a week of doing one route to make time instead of two days.  My nine year old son had surgery, I was denied the day off to be there in the hospital with him, I had to call him during a break to tell him I loved him.  That broke my heart.  I didn't want a paid day off, just a day to be with my son in the hospital.  After three months of asking for a single day off for a doctor's visit for my own health, and being denied repeatedly (I was told that to get a day off I had to take a full week, and didn't have enough vacation time banked up yet, plus time off expires at the end of each year and is cashed out), I had had enough.  They told me I was looking at 5-7 years of this crap to make career where I could get guaranteed time off.  I'm not putting up with that BS, being sent halfway across the state on a regular basis with no way to schedule a day off for five plus years while making $17.79 an hour.  Subs (CCA's) are overworked, mistreated, and for the northern NJ area they're underpaid.  Knowing what I now know, I tend to give them a break.  Don't even get me started on houses with hidden or missing house numbers, especially on streets that have odd number sequences.  

That said, no matter how late I was running, and no matter how many nasty text messages or scanner messages I got from my supervisor (if I was late getting back and missed the mail truck she would have to drive the outgoing mail to Bergen Co herself),  I never once abandoned mail or skipped streets/houses.  So for THAT I have no sympathy, the job sucks, but deliver the damned mail.