The Baboon Congress

Mail Truck Muddle

33 Comments

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

My friend Janelle from work has all the luck. She is keenly observant with a sensitive radar for the absurd, and notices more funny things in the world than anyone else I know.  She recently told me about something she witnessed only a block or two from my house and  oh, I wish I had been there.

Janelle stopped after work to see her brother. They were standing out front of his house talking to one of the neighbors when she noticed that there were two small Postal Service trucks delivering mail. Now, this is odd in itself, as the mail in our neighborhood is delivered around noon, not after 5:00 pm, and there are never two trucks working in tandem. The mail carriers parked on the same side of the street, and each got our of their truck and walked ahead to deliver the mail. When they went back to  get more mail, they traded trucks and each drove the other’s truck down the block, as though they were leap-frogging, trading vehicles as they went. Just then, two large mail vans pulled up, and their drivers got out and started delivering more mail to houses that had just had mail deliveries from the first two carriers. The drivers of the small trucks turned their vehicles around and drove back to the larger vans. The street was blocked  with mail trucks. All the carriers got out of their vehicles and yelled and waived their arms around with angry gestures. Then they all returned to their trucks and drove away. At this point neighbors came out of their homes and looked through their mail and traded mail with one another, as much of it had been delivered to the wrong addresses!

I can’t even begin to guess what was going on in this scenario.

Can you explain what was happening?  

 

 

33 thoughts on “Mail Truck Muddle”

  1. Like you, I wish I had been there to see this.

    I’m going to say somewhere along the line, somebody is being trained, or rather not trained, but thrown into something completely new with no training, because nobody can afford to train someone, everybody is supposed to pay to be trained so they can get a job.

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  2. Who knows? But it may help explain why it took nine whole days for the birthday card (in an envelope) my sister sent me, to get here.

    I know a lot of people are critical of the US Postal Service, and it does seem that it is not as efficient as it once was. However, they move an incredible volume of mail every day. Like most people, I suspect, the vast majority of the mail I get is junk mail. Seed and flower catalogs, cruise vacation catalogs, invitations to explore senior housing options, hearing aid offers, solicitations for donations from various charities, and on and on it goes. It boggles my mind to consider the incredible amount of resources that are squandered this way.

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  3. It turns out that that mail carrier who always finished his route earlier than anyone else had been dumping all the junk mail for his route in his garage instead of delivering it. Of course none of the intended recipients missed it. When the stash was discovered, all unsorted and too much for any one carrier to deal with, the supervisor insisted that it all be delivered immediately and divided the load among several carriers who had finished their routes and were ready to head home. Nobody was happy. Since they were sorting the stuff on the fly, mistakes were frequent and unavoidable, but it was junk mail, some of it months old, so who cares?

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  4. People in one of the houses on that block had been on vacation for a few weeks, and followed in the appropriate “Hold Mail” procedures on line. A major TYOP was made somewhere along the way, so while the family was away the entire block’s mail was held. The result is described above.

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  6. I don’t know but I’m very happy no one died in a shoot out. At one time “Going postal” actually meant a specific location and employment type for mass shootings.

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  7. The Postal Service has started a new initiative (perhaps to combat “going postal”) to make it a more fun place to work. One of the new programs is to have mail delivery a more spontaneous and fun activity – Leap Frog Home Delivery. Argument ensued when little trucks accused big trucks of not playing by the rules.

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  8. Mail delivery out here has been pretty interesting with the advent of the oil boom. We have had mail delivered after dark, the mail carrier wearing one of those head lamp things that spelunkers wear to illuminate the path. We also have had mail delivered on Sunday.

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  9. A service that puts addresses on junk mail malfunctioned and addressed mail over and over again to the streets that got all that mail instead of sending to the entire list of addresses where it should have gone. Some one who should have been checking the out put of the addressing service failed to find the the error until a very large amount junk mail had been addressed to go to the houses where all that mail was delivered. The company that does the addressing decided to just go ahead and let all that mail go to those houses to avoid throwing away mail that they had been paid to send out.

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  10. Gosh, this must have been funny to watch.

    Unfortunately, I have no explanation for this, but I do have a couple mail-delivery anecdotes.

    On my block, the letter carrier parks his truck and then walks down one side of the street to deliver mail and up the other side. Several years ago, we had a letter carrier who was too lazy to park his truck and walk. He would drive up to a house, hop out, deliver the mail, then back to his truck and repeat. Of course, he figured out that this was inefficient, so he never got out of his truck if he had just one or two pieces of mail, but would wait until there was enough mail for it to be worth his while to make the effort to deliver it. I know this because we got mail 1-3 times a week, and never less than half a dozen pieces at a time. Of course, this was back before I had auto-pay on my bills, so invariably when I put out a paid bill to be mailed, those were the days I would see him whizzing past my house and stopping down the block.

    A while after this guy left (thank goodness), we had a period of time where there was 2 deliveries per day. Sometimes we have a USPS person who will just deliver packages, but this was two regular letter carriers. It took me a while to catch on that this was happening, but after I saw them delivering mail one right after the other or, once or twice, at the same time, then it became obvious. They never got into a fight over it, though, or played leapfrog.

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  11. If I still had contact with my very funny carrier at the office, he would probably say some stupid regulation or stupid postmaster driving people nuts, or some feud between postmen was behind it all.

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  13. with the amazon shipmen s becomng such a major part of the mail these days and the consequences amazon has created for the failure to have delivery in 48 hours for amazon prme and however many days or the regular shipments i believe the usps delivery people have gotten to the point where they fill the truck on a basis of when the truck is full out it goes….it would be good to wait but the cost would be an extra day. they dont t\dare tick off amazon or ebay . if they do the ups or fedex competition takes up the slack and usps loses a gajillion dollars a day. i have the most interestign thing happening on my computer right now. it is typing backwards. it starts on the bottom right of the word box and types so the worrds back upp to the beginning of the line. this computer is a functioning odd unit with many irregularirties. it has .
    caused me to adapt rather than try to figure out how to make it adapt.

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    1. my guess is thaat your part of north dakota may well use more amazon than the aerage location seeing as the 2 dya amazon shipments are easier than trying to find it in bumf^^^ northdakota.
      if you aare orgaized you cna shop online for anything and everything thses days.
      the deals amazon and ebay get instread of regular costs are amazing. i wouldnt be surprised if they make mpre on shipments than on sales. big push on international shipment being done through their office rather than the usual way. i believe they have a specail deal on that too.

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  16. thanks dale for getting it in. is it still a 5am start normally. i know this one got submitted ove rthe weekend and i thank you for getting t up so we have new stuf but i didnt check back after the 5am coming and going and no new entry. my bad. i saw the trucks out on sunday and wondered what the heck was going on. i am so on the street in this new house. i never saw the outside world in the old one.

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