Postal workers have earned our gratitude
Caught in an avalanche of packages, US Postal Service, United Parcel Service and FedEx drivers, and anyone else who makes deliveries for a living, were slammed this pandemonic holiday season with an unprecedented volume of work under a tight deadline.
All these workers deserve our thanks, our praise and our respect for soldiering on through difficult conditions, but I want especially to acknowledge the postal carriers also tasked with delivering our daily mail. As an avid paper-letter correspondent, someone for whom staying in touch by way of letters has been essential to my mental, social and emotional health, I have an intimate relationship with the postal service, and any interruption in the flow of correspondence is disconcerting. Every December is tough on mailmen and -women, but this one proved almost impossible. Those days when no mail at all arrived because drivers ran out of time felt like one more symptom of the collapse of civilization.
But people impatient with and frustrated by December’s irregular deliveries might consider the staggering volume of mail — up 75% over the previous year, according to USPS Bay Area corporate communications officer Augustine Ruiz — thanks largely to disruptions caused by the coronavirus. In order to get a realistic sense of what Santa Cruz mail carriers do, both during this exceptional season and more generally, I asked Mr. Ruiz in an email exchange for some numbers to put their efforts in perspective. “Our carriers have been working well over 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week,” he told me. “Some of these carriers even volunteered to work without any days off so that we can deliver needed packages, such as medications.” He added that “our carriers were also affected by COVID-19, along with their families.”
Some other pertinent figures: 52 carriers work out of the downtown post office covering 36 routes of approximately 12 miles each; of the roughly 60,000 pieces of mail processed in a typical day by the post office, each carrier handles about 1600 pieces; during the holiday rush, 11,000 to 15,000 packages a day came through the SCPO — more than 200 packages per carrier. While a typical shift is eight to nine hours, they were putting in a lot of overtime. “We rented five vans to help accommodate the volume,” Mr. Ruiz told me. “We averaged about 15 carriers every Sunday from neighboring offices to help as well,” including four postmasters on top of regular drivers.
These public servants are essential workers, and as far as I’m concerned are akin to first responders in their heroism. The tedious and grueling tasks of sorting mail under intense time demands, of driving the routes and lifting the boxes and dodging bad dogs and other obstacles are not for wimps. And the clerks behind the counter patiently weighing and making sure outgoing parcels are securely wrapped and properly addressed, and putting up with the agitation of customers under their own pressures and anxieties — clerks who are potentially exposed to infection all day long — are tough-minded professionals who somehow maintain their equanimity and efficiency in the face of borderline chaos. If someone makes an occasional error, I give them a break since to me it seems almost miraculous that any given letter is correctly delivered.
So here’s to the stamina, the courtesy, the grace under pressure of those who in the midst of a deadly pandemic interact with the unpredictable public day after day, or who are driving and walking all over town hauling their cargo for hours on end making their appointed rounds. While those of us working from home have the dubious luxury of hanging out at a keyboard and staring at a screen all day — no easy task, and with its own insidious perils — mail carriers must navigate a real world that is even more physically dangerous and demanding. From the privilege of my life of letters I hold those who sort and deliver those letters in high esteem.