The white truck with the stylized blue logo stops at every mailbox six days a week. The mail carrier picks up outgoing and drops off incoming mail. While the mail carrier usually completes business and drives off, sometimes we manage to catch them for a few minutes just to chat. The United States Postal Service operates an integral service in our society despite the rise of the online business. Greeting our mail carrier conveys how important their daily operations are to us.
In August, Rod Hanson marked the end of a 22-year career. He started delivering mail in Bellingham in 1994 after a 20-year career in the U.S. Air Force as an air traffic controller followed by a year in construction. Rod says his first week alone logged 64 work hours despite having only been given a guaranteed 20-hour a week, part-time position.
As he is standing in front of some apartment mailboxes he dropped mail into daily, Rod says his route for the last 20 years covered over 1,100 addresses between businesses, houses and apartments.
According to data from Glassdoor, factoring in for a five-day work week with each address receiving an average of at least one piece of mail per day and 474 estimated days off afforded to him given the length of his career, Rod has handled a minimum of 5.8 million articles of mail. With automated sorting systems becoming the norm in recent years, he can attest to having an average of 1,800 first-class letters per day. Combining that average to the previous estimate pushes Rod’s total mail handled much higher. This also excludes packages and heavy traffic times such as holidays and the academic calendar of the local higher education institutions where mail volume increases a significant amount.
Another statistic Rod shares is the frequency of reported incidents involving dogs and mail carriers. He says there is an average of 6,000 incidents reported annually by postal workers, corroborated by an announcement from USPS earlier this year in May, and even he has had his share of dog-related events.
“I was doing a walking route downtown, delivering to residences. It was summer and it was hot. They had their front door open, the screen door was closed. I started to walk up and this huge lab,” holding his hands out to emphasize the dog’s size, “came through the screen door at me.”
Rod explains that mail carriers are trained to use their satchels on walking routes as their first defense in a dog encounter to protect their body. Between having to spin around to keep the satchel in the dog’s way from biting him from behind and the owner saying “she won’t bite, she just wants to play,” it was a bad day for Rod. But that is not to say every dog he has encountered during his career viewed him as a threat. Some of the best friends he made were of the furry, four-legged variety.
Rod says challenges facing a mail carrier are different when compared to his previous jobs. “It’s not challenging in compared to an architect or an engineer, but it’s challenging because a good carrier likes to know who he’s delivering mail to. We work really hard to learn the names of everybody. If a patron stayed at one place for more than a month, I generally met them,” he tells me. “After a while, you stop looking at addresses and you look at the name and you just know where it goes. I’ve had mail where it said ‘Grandma, Bellingham WA’ and I would know where it goes because I recognized the granddaughter’s name. It’s just learning things.”
I ask about his experience overall with his customers on the route and he gives a smile as he thinks back. Rod says that the customers he met over the years are what made his time as a mail carrier more than just a job. “I had some of the nicest people. Every Christmas, they would say ‘here, have some hot chocolate.’ I would get really nice Christmas gifts from them… It was just really, really nice to call them friends. And I’ll miss them. It was more than a job to me, it was a way for me to get out and meet people. I love to meet people, and talk and have fun.”
