Michigan postal worker

January 24, 2009

Maybe thats where the term comes from...eh...

DETROIT — There were jokes and snickers at a Michigan post office when customers learned that an overwhelmed carrier had rented a storage unit to hide thousands of pieces of mail.

"I heard a couple of people come in and say, 'Can I pick up my mail — or is it in storage?"' said Annette Koss, the postmaster in Howell, 50 miles northwest of Detroit. "We just didn't understand it. It's such a stupid thing to do."

Jill Hull pleaded guilty Tuesday to deserting the mail, a misdemeanor. The case is rare but it happens: From North Carolina to North Dakota, carriers in recent months have been hauled to court for failing to fulfill their routes.

Mail has been found in basements, garages and, in Hull's case, a self-storage unit in Michigan's Livingston County. In North Carolina, a mail carrier admitted to keeping junk mail buried in his backyard.

In September, after she had failed to pay her bill, managers opened Hull's unit and discovered thousands of pieces of unopened mail, including 988 first-class letters. Some had postmarks from 2005.

"I was unable to deliver all the mail," Hull, 34, said during a brief hearing in federal court in Detroit.

In a court filing, postal investigator Douglas Mills said Hull had planned to catch up with late payments and apparently keep the mail under lock and key until she died.

No one on the rural route had complained about missing any mail.

"Looking back at her time sheets, she was leaving early everyday," said Koss, who became postmaster shortly after the discovery. "It's like it got dark and she didn't know what to do with the mail."

Hull and her attorney had no comment after the guilty plea. The maximum penalty is a year in prison, but Hull is hoping for probation.

The Postal Service says there were 333 cases of theft, delay or destruction of mail by employees or contractors filed in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. A California postal manager was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing thousands of DVDs.

More than 600,000 postal employees last March received a reminder in their pay statement that delaying, stealing or throwing away mail is a crime. "You don't have to be a genius to know," it said with an image of Albert Einstein.

"It's not a systemic issue; the majority of employees are hardworking and honest," said Agapi Doulaveris, spokeswoman for the Postal Service's internal investigators.

Postal Service spokesman Gerry McKiernan said steadily decreasing mail volume — down by 9 billion pieces in the last fiscal year — and route changes should help alleviate any stress felt by carriers.

In North Dakota, Allen Prochnow, 62, will be sentenced in March for delaying mail for 10 years. Four tons were removed from his house in Wahpeton, including 3,000 pieces of first-class mail.

"He'd see a magazine he'd like to read and pretty soon it was quite a bit of mail," lawyer John Goff said. "A lot of it was piled neatly along walls in the house. In his own mind he was building a bunker. ... His most frequent answer has been, 'I don't know why."'

A tip from a meter reader led authorities last year to the home of Steven Padgett, 59, a carrier who delivered in the Apex, N.C., area. Authorities used four trucks to remove third-class mail that had been stashed in his garage for six years.

Padgett felt "it was almost a relief to get caught," lawyer Andrew McCoppin said in a court filing.

"He denied that it stemmed from an anti-junk mail moral protest. It seems more likely that this man ... could not admit to himself or his employer that he was beginning to have difficulty getting the job done," McCoppin said.

Padgett was placed on probation and fined $3,000 — a penalty that was mostly paid by MailChimp, an Atlanta company that specializes in marketing through e-mail, not traditional mail.

"We're doing everything we can to stop junk mail. We can relate" with Padgett, said co-founder Ben Chestnut, tongue in cheek.

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From Britan

New software that plans routes sets impossible delivery targets, say critics

The tardy postal delivery is a source of constant irritation for many a family in Britain, and postal workers are all too often the first to suffer a sharp rebuke from people about the efficiency of their service. But perhaps we should not be too quick to accuse our letter deliverers of laziness.

The postal union says its workers are being "bullied" into walking at unsustainable speeds to finish their rounds more quickly and cut costs for the Royal Mail. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) accused bosses at Royal Mail of pressuring employees to walk at unrealistic average speeds, which ultimately result in some post being delivered late or, worse, the following day.

Project Management Standard Program The dispute centres around a fancy new piece of Canadian software which automatically calculates delivery walks and is being rolled out by Royal Mail bosses. It will work out how much workers should be expected to deliver during each round. Each postal walk is meant to last three and a half hours but if the calculations are wrong, they can take much longer. The "Pegasus Geo Route" software system holds detailed information on more than 27 million addresses in the UK and helps automate the sorting of 80 million items of mail every night, a figure which jumps to 120 million over Christmas. To calculate how much post can be delivered during each round, a postal worker has to enter an average speed for the round. Official guidelines designate the average speed should be 2.1 miles per hour but workers say they are often expected to key double that amount into the software system.

The Royal Mail denied forcing workers to walk faster than 2.1mph and said the company does not tolerate bullying of any kind. But the dispute has thrown a fascinating light on how the delivery of our post is increasingly left up to computer systems, and that pressure to cut costs could lead to a reduction in the quality of service.

Bob Gibson, national official for the CWU, said: "Royal Mail is using this system to meet financial savings without considering the physical realities of delivery rounds. This is putting pressure on delivery workers and leading to bullying and harassment."

Mr Gibson said bosses were pushing ahead with the system without consulting workers. "We're getting high volumes of complaints and seeing deterioration in industrial relations and service standards."

One area hit particularly hard is Watford, where Pegasus was brought in this year to redraw and reduce the number of delivery routes. After the new calculations, 17 workers had their short-term contracts terminated and customers complained that thousands of letters remained undelivered. The local Labour MP, Claire Ward, called the new delivery system a "mess" after managers and administration staff had to be drafted in to sort the undelivered letters.

Postal workers also say Pegasus fails to take into account the amount of extra time often needed for recorded and special deliveries which often require a signature from the addressee.

A Royal Mail spokesman said: "Royal Mail would never ask or require postmen and women to do anything they are not capable of performing. It is nonsense to suggest that we require anyone to deliver the mail at an average walking speed of more than four miles an hour."

A postman's story

'We're being bullied'

"Steve" (not his real name) has been a postman in south London for 12 years

"Delivery is meant to take three-and-a-half hours but my average is at best four-and-a-half, usually five. Management say they only want us to walk at 2.1mph but that's a joke. At that pace, I'd never get things done. One bloke is getting on a bit. Last week, a manager went on the walk with him to make sure he wasn't being deliberately slow. It's this sort of thing that makes us feel like we're getting bullied."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn41...12/ai_n31131757