The United States Postal Service

[Occulus]

There have been a couple threads over the past day or so regarding the USPS and its finances. In those threads, there has been a great deal of misinformation posted; clearly, someone who knows something about the USPS should say something. As a postal employee for about fifteen years, I am intimately familiar with the organization and how it works as seen from the point of view of those who actually sort the mail.

As a rule, I have found that the general public has no idea at all of how we do what we do, the effort- often backbreaking effort, literally- involved in moving the mail, and yes, the dangers the workers face- even ordinary plant workers like myself. It is a very complicated system that has been developed to provide universal service to all addresses in the country. I'm not going to talk about rates or labor/management issues here; however, I think you deserve to know how we do what we do.

I could just resurrect an old post or two of mine, but I think I'll take the effort to just rewrite what I've written before. Thus, I give you

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A LETTER.

Hai! I'm a letter, and you just dropped me into a blue box or your own mailbox. Your local carrier will pick me up soon; I'm stamped and ready to sort! You've clearly- CLEARLY- written the destination address on the front of me, didn't you? Oh, well, no matter. The machines that will sort me can puzzle it out- oh, but I'm jumping ahead of myself. Let's go off to the plant!

Now that I'm actually in the mailstream at my Processing and Distribution Center, things really get rolling. I'm dumped into an orange, plastic hamper along with hundreds of other unsorted letters. Gosh, it's crowded in here! We're all facing every which way, some of us are getting bent or even folded, and our addresses are directing us every which way in the local area. WOW! There's one going to England, and another that's written in Cyrillic! I guess we're destined to go all over the globe in this group!

Whoa, what's this? We're all being swung up into the air! Oh, I see- were being dumped wholesale onto a conveyor belt. Gosh, this is quite the ride! But I'm told I haven't seen anything yet. Now that I'm on the belt with all the other mail, I can see that there are rotating drums up ahead with a set gap at the bottom. Larger versions of my companions- envelopes with a thickness to them, for the most part- are being diverted to another part of the machine, but I'm just a letter, so I'll go right on through.

I've dropped onto another belt now and.... what the hell?!??! There's a fast-moving pair of belts up ahead! The letters in front of me are getting pulled into the belts and flying off between them with a quickness. I'm getting squashed between some other letters now, and I can see some metal "fingers" holding us in place until we each go through individually.

What was that giant sucking sound? That's the biohazard detector. The USPS uses this to detect anthrax in the envelopes, and if it's found, the whole facility closes; the employees are evacuated, stripped, and sprayed down, and I guess they have to surrender everything they brought to work with them for destruction. Wow, that's quite a sacrifice hanging over their heads- all their cash, electronics (from an Ipod to a laptop), even their keys! I'm glad I didn't have any anthrax in me!

Well, now I'm in another part of the machine and that was a camera! This is pretty high-tech stuff- the camera just read what you wrote on the front of me and used optical character recognition software to puzzle out your very handwriting. And it does it with incredible speed, so much so that tens of thousands of letters per hour can be read in this way. Oohh, now that tickled... I just got sprayed with a barcode.

That barcode is pretty important; the machinery up ahead will use that to determine how I'm sorted. Now that I have that information, the machine's operator is putting me into a tray with a whole bunch of other letters, all neatly stacked from one end to the other, and all of us faced the right direction. I guess the machine has belts that twist once to flip us, but I didn't have to go through that part- I was lucky enough to be faced the right way to begin with.

I'm in a tall metal cart now, a holding container with around thirty other trays full of letters. There must be thousands of us in here! Are we ready to go through another machine? Well, ready or not, here we go! I'm being inducted into a machine called a Delivery BarCode Sorter now. This machine will sort me and all the others at high speed into one of up to 270 (or even more) stackers on the machine. I'll whip around through the belts, and in front of another camera that will read my barcode. That barcode tells the machine where I'm ultimately bound, and the machine's sortplan will use that information to send me to the proper stacker.

I'm a little bit closer to being ready to be delivered now, but there are still two major steps to perform. This will involve two more passes through the same type of equipment I just went through. I know, I know- it sounds redundant, but it's actually vitally necessary. On the first pass through the machine, I and the other letters bound for a specific locale will be put into a sequence in the overall first pass run. At this point, there aren't any specific locales to worry about- each tray is labeled Seq. 1, Seq. 2, Seq. 3, and so on. Here we go!

Now that the first pass is complete, I'm going into the second pass. This is called the Delivery Point Sequence operation, and it's an ingenious way to help your local carrier do their job. After the first pass is complete, the second pass sorts the mail into each individual carrier's "walk sequence"- the exact path the carrier will take when making his or her rounds. The machine "knows" which sequence I'm a part of, and (assuming all the trays are "in sequence") sorts me to my proper place automatically. Again, this is done at a speed of tens of thousands of pieces per hour, so I know I'll be getting to my destination soon!

I'm going onto a truck now, in the same sort of container I've been staged in this whole time. Amazing! In a single day, I've been collected, faced, had my destination determined, been sprayed with a barcode, sorted at least three times through a DBCS machine, placed into the carrier's route sequence, and now I'm on my way to the local office for delivery. Wherever I'm going, I'll be loaded into the carrier's truck, and then it's delivery time!

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The above deals only with a single letter. The USPS uses a large amount of high-tech equipment to sort the mail. Perhaps the most impressive, visually speaking, is the Automated Flat Sorting Machine, or AFSM. This monster of a machine has something like eighteen computers inside it, and can sort large, "flat" envelopes, magazines, and letters that cannot be sorted on a DBCS. Many of the magazines and all large envelopes are sorted on this equipment; it's a mazelike contraption with conveyors, elevators, and a long, rotating carousel equipped with buckets that literally drop the mail into its respective bin.

People, this is often backbreaking labor. The carts we push and pull around weigh hundreds to thousands of pounds apiece, and they all need to be moved prior to being sorted. Pallets of advertising mail- officially, "Presort Standard"; colloquially, "junk mail"- come in by the dozen, each loaded with thousands upon thousands of pieces of mail. We have to take off each cardboard sleeve, stage the trays on carts, and move them for processing, lift them again onto the machine- trays which can weigh upward of fifty pounds apiece- and load them into the machines, tray by tray. This part isn't automatic in most cases- many plants, such as the one I work in, do not have the system (called the Tray Management System) that is used to do all the bulk movement automatically.

Employee injury is a constant danger. I had a fingernail torn off last fall by a falling metal shelf, and I could as easily have lost the fingertip. Other employees have suffered nerve damage and repetitive motion injuries, serious back problems, and of course the ever-present danger of muscle strain. We have to constantly be aware of where we are and what we're about; the equipment we use can (and has been known to) bite off fingers. One employee a few years ago was killed in a facility near me while working on the above-mentioned flat sorting machine, and a year or so ago a city carrier slipped on some ice and was impaled through the head by one of those plastic marker rods sticking up out of the snow that people use to find the curb in a snowdrift.

It's a dangerous job, and for the most part- for those of us who work in the distribution centers, at least- bluntly unrewarding. It's noisy, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work, but it has to be done. Were the USPS to collapse tomorrow, the economy would crash completely- we really do handle that much critical information. I shudder to think of the value of the registered mail that goes through our facility- that's mail that is sent in a special way and closely watched and guarded the entire time: things like end-of-week store receipts, mail that has been insured, confidential mail too sensitive to be included in the rest of the mailstream, and so on. It's work so critical it's performed in a cage within the distribution center itself, a locked wire box that cannot be entered by anyone but the scheduled employee(s).

I hope I've helped to describe the how of what we do in the USPS. Bear in mind, this was only one small aspect of the overall operation; I didn't cover parcels, priority mail, express mail, or the manual operation at all. The automation section is but one little part of what the USPS does. Hopefully, you now have a little greater understanding of what's involved. It's a very complex process, and we do it millions of times a day.