A vehicle like this may come to your home 6-times a week so it fits the CarTalk topics…
Since almost all of us receive our mail at our home, a vehicle like this is probably dropping off your mail… Today, in our mailbox, I found a card the size of a business card from my mail carrier letting me know he was going on vacation. Probably so we would know if the mail was late, wet, damaged, etc… it wasn’t he who damaged it… L L . . .
I thought it was pretty-neat and I have never gotten anything like this previously. I scanned the QR Code and wait until you see what comes up…
These days it seems that where I am, if my carrier is down for some reason, then we just don’t get mail. It seems there are no back-up subs nor even back-up vehicles.
A month or to ago I saw my carrier’s truck - just like the one pictured - go by on a tow truck. I didn’t get mail for the whole next week.
I was treated to that same sight last summer, but fortunately my deliveries weren’t interrupted.
Let’s not forget that those Grumman Long Life delivery vehicles are–at a minimum–31 years old. New custom-made vehicles–made by Oshkosh–will be arriving within the next 3 months. The USPS has also ordered more conventional vehicles from both Ford & Stellantis, and those are already on duty in some areas.
My guy has got an old one. Who knows how old. On a cold day I happened to see him an asked if his heater worked. He said sort of. I know they have staffing issues and haven’t seen the cute girl with long red hair for a year. I know one of the back up guys was deaf when I tried to talk to him. Tough job but seems like a regular basis we trade mail that went to the wrong bay or next door. Comes any time from 2:00 to 9:30. Hard to see the addresses at night.
I have ‘informed delivery’, a free service that sends me an e-mail the morning of a delivery with a scan of the envelopes, info on the packages. I’ve never heard of a mailman taking time off and there being no deliveries, but I receive mail so rarely…
Heh heh, they have subs that cover the routes when they take time off.
If we are away for a while we have our mail forwarded. It takes a couple weeks for it to start coming through, and then you have to quit a week ahead to make sure your mail gets home mil bil used the informed delivery. One year we rented a condo in a complex but the owner refused to give us the mail box key. We were in Florida and he was in Canada. So I’d have to watch for the mail delivery and meet her when she opened the group boxes. Then she’d let me take our mail. It was tax time so I had documents I had to have to file my taxes. What a jerk that Canadian was. The post office told me to just have the lock drilled but didn’t want to do that. So yeah I still get stuff by mail I have to have.
I am on a rural route. And I’ve been at my address for going on 30 years. We never had any trouble until DeJoy was appointed PM General. The issues started pretty much immediately after that. Too long a story to tell. But it’s not just my route, and it wasn’t just the one time when the mail truck broke down. There are widespread issues in my general area, including on some routes that aren’t rural. Staffing/budgeting issues do loom large in that picture. Leaner and meaner.
When I was a little boy in the early '50s, we lived in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State in a log cabin. Our address was Box 522, Stop 7, Route 9, Warren County, NY.
Our mail was not always Rural Free Delivery (RFD), it stated out as we had to go to town (Potterville) and collect our mail at the “Post House,” we did not have a post office, but the mail house was the Post Woman’s house (Martha was her name…) with an oak postal window installed in the front part of her living room (our address was simply Potterville, NY then…).
There were no mail boxes… then we got our mail boxes and our mail became RFD and when we got off the school bus, we kids ran to the mail boxes to collect our mail and hope that those dimes and quarters we sent to Battle Creek, Michigan, had returned some treasure ordered from the back of a comic book or magazine…
I do not believe Martha ever got any time off, nor do I remember her ever not working… Her husband was a lumberjack and they often spent several days in the woods logging, so I do not think he was any help…
Well, the very old, very worn out old USPS truck did its appointed job last week enabling the mail carrier to deliver the Christmas present envelope a friend mailed to me the second week of December to swiftly arrive in my mailbox the last week of March.
I did see a new postal vehicle a few days ago. It looked like a small van, somewhat like a windowless Dodge Caravan. The USPS markings were very understated such that I almost didn’t realize it was a postal mail delivery vehicle.
I can’t quite top that timeline, but here is a recent–unnerving–experience of mine:
For the first time in my life, I had to file an amended 1040 a few weeks after I thought that I had accurately filed my 2024 tax return. Even though I always file my federal and state taxes electronically, an amended return has to be filed with a hard copy, and must be mailed to the IRS.
So, for “security”, I mailed my amended return to the IRS office in Kansas City, MO, on February 28th, via Certified Mail with Return Receipt. I then used the USPS’s tracking service to follow my big manila envelope’s progress. It left the local PO promptly, but then it was hung-up in various places around the country for an incredibly long time.
Without posting all of the starts & stops, I’ll just cut to the chase: It took 21 days for my amended tax return and my check for the additional tax liability to get signed-for at the Kansas City IRS Office. Using Google Maps, I found that I could have driven it to Kansas City in 17 hours–even though they likely wouldn’t accept hand-delivered documents.
A few days before it was received, I was finally able to get through to the IRS in order to inquire about the possibility that it had actually been received, but that the USPS’s tracking data was lagging. I was told that they have gotten a LOT of similar calls, and that the problem was twofold: Understaffing at the USPS was causing a very long transit time for mail such as this, and recent massive layoffs at the Treasury Department meant that there was–literally–nobody to process the incoming mail at the Kansas City IRS Office. Thanks, DOGE!
Ironically, I received the Return Receipt just two days after my tax return was finally in the hands of The IRS, so mail can move quickly–but apparently that doesn’t necessarily apply to Certified Mail nowadays.
Yes, understaffing around here as well. When our regular carrier was out on medical leave, that left one carrier for the town. We simply did not get mail for about a week. Fortunately, I do very little by mail anymore so no real impact to me. But the continuous budget reductions have left them operating on a razor thin staffing level. They still have the older trucks around here…
We got notices to raise or mailboxes to 42 inches above the street. This is to accommodate the height of the new trucks.
Back in the 60s, in Minneapolis, our mail carries walked their routes, mail was delivered to boxes affixed near the door.
Unless they have changed the height requirment is 41 to 45 inches. If the street has been resurfaced that could reduce the distance from street to mail box. That is what happened to a small town near us recently. Did the notice actually say it was because of the new trucks ?
L . . .
