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New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
What Does Your Mailman Know About You? More Than Your Address.
MAILMAN: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home, by Stephen Starring Grant The worst thing about delivering the mail, Stephen Starring Grant says in 'Mailman,' his warm and oddly patriotic new book about being a rural carrier in Virginia for a year during Covid, isn't dogs, although some 5,000 carriers are attacked each year and a few die each decade. To fend them off, postal workers learn to carry multiple cans of Halt! dog training, they're told to take nothing for granted: 'Spray it till the can goes dry. Get them in the T zone: eyes and nose, eyes and nose.' The worst thing isn't the seething bees and wasps (also spiders) that lurk in neglected mailboxes. It isn't the awkward and painful stretching required to drive stock vehicles from the passenger seat, which one must do when, as often happens, a rural carrier supplies his or her own car. It isn't how heavily armed people are now, so that there is a 'continuous nonzero chance of someone shooting you.' It isn't rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail nor extreme heat in un-air-conditioned postal trucks. It isn't the 69-pound packages (the U.S.P.S. declines anything over 70). It isn't the high injury rate, especially for rotator cuffs. The worst thing about delivering mail is the 'casing' that's required before you head out each morning. To case the mail is to painstakingly set everything (envelopes, boxes, magazines, postcards, parcels, you name it) in order, so that you can easily retrieve it while on the road. 'The fact is that every day, each letter carrier effectively builds a library, loads it into a truck and then disperses that library in route order,' Grant writes. Casing takes patience. Many rubber bands are involved. It's a hassle. Doing it poorly can add misery and hours to your day. Grant found himself grudgingly delivering the mail in middle age (he was 50) because he'd lost his job as a marketing consultant. He had a wife, two teenage daughters and a tiny but worrisome nugget of prostate cancer. He needed the job for health insurance and to ward off the biggest dog, depression. Several years earlier, he'd moved his family from Brooklyn back to his hometown, Blacksburg, Va., in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so that his children would grow up with grass under their feet. Until he was laid off, he still commuted regularly to New York and other major cities. Delivering the mail was harder on Grant, physically and mentally, than he'd expected, he tells us in 'Mailman.' But he offers insight and cheer about the upsides. He liked being able to check in on lonely people and do good turns. He often felt he delivered something more than just the mail: 'Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You know, the stuff that a government is supposed to do for its people.' He enjoyed the rich pageant of offbeat products that flowed through his truck. 'If you think your carrier doesn't notice when you order a sex toy,' he writes, 'you're wrong.' He liked the days when orders of baby chicks came in, though delivering the heavy bags of chicken feed that followed was a bummer. People gave him cookies; he often got free coffee at Starbucks. He got a lot of steps in, often 15,000 a day. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Verge
3 days ago
- General
- The Verge
The tech that the US Post Office gave us
When you crack open your mailbox, it's almost as if your letters just appear. Long before the days of speedy, overnight mail deliveries, postal service workers meticulously sorted through letters by hand and transported mail on horseback. For more than 250 years, the US Postal Service has worked behind the scenes to build a faster delivery network, and this mission has quietly pushed it to the forefront of technology. 'Most people treat the Postal Service like a black box,' USPS spokesperson Jim McKean tells The Verge. 'You take your letter, you put it in a mailbox, and then it shows up somewhere in a couple of days. The truth is that that piece of mail gets touched by a lot of people and machines and transported in that period of time — it's a modern marvel.' One of its big breakthroughs took place in 1918 with the introduction of airmail. The USPS worked with the Army Signal Corps to use leftover World War I aircraft to launch the service, and the planes were as barebones as they could get. An excerpt from a 1968 issue of Postal Life called the early aircraft 'a nervous collection of whistling wires' with 'linen stretched over wooden ribs, all attached to a wheezy, water-cooled engine.' At the time, pilots literally risked their lives delivering mail — 34 of them died between 1918 and 1927. 'There was no commercial aviation, no airports. There was no radio. There was no navigation,' USPS historian Stephen Kochersperger says. 'The Postal Service had to develop all of those things just for getting the mail delivered.' Once the USPS established that it could reliably deliver mail by plane, Congress allowed it to contract airmail service to commercial aviation companies, laying the groundwork for the major airlines that we know today, like American Airlines and United Airlines. Along with getting paid for delivering mail, contractors found that they could make even more money by carrying passengers with their cargo. 'That was where commercial aviation took off,' Kochersperger says. Airmail routes gradually began to expand internationally, first to Canada and then to Cuba. But a couple decades later, the USPS experimented with a novel form of delivery: mail-by-missile. In 1959, the USPS and the US Navy loaded a Regulus I missile with two mail containers that had 3,000 letters in total. The missile traveled 100 miles in around 23 minutes, successfully landing at a Navy base in Mayport, Florida, with the help of a parachute. Despite its success, the idea never took off. It turns out missiles just can't carry that much mail. And overall, this rather ridiculous demonstration was more of a stunt to show force during the Cold War, according to the Smithsonian. Back on the ground, the USPS set its sights on improving the speed of mail processing. Though it began experimenting with a mail canceling machine in the 1920s, which put a mark on used postage, it wasn't until the 1950s that it deployed an electromechanical sorting machine. Instead of manually sorting mail using the 'pigeonhole' method, in which workers would insert pieces of mail into different compartments inside the post office depending on the address, the machine could do that for them. 'The Postal Service is a driver of technological change.' The Transorma multi-position letter sorting machine measured 13 feet high and was split across two levels. It carried mail on a conveyor belt from its lower level to a group of five postal workers at the upper level. The clerks would then use a keyboard to enter information about their destination. Based on the inputted information, the machine would then transport letters to different trays and drop them into chutes that brought them back to the lower level. But as the volume of mail increased in the years after World War II — going from 33 billion pieces of mail per year to 66.5 billion between 1943 and 1962 — the USPS needed a way to keep up. For years, the USPS had depended on clerks to memorize dozens of delivery schemes that they would use to sort letters, preparing them for carriers to distribute throughout town. 'That changed dramatically in 1963, [with] probably the biggest innovation the Postal Service has ever rolled out, called the ZIP code,' Kochersperger says. 'For the first time, mailing lists could be digitized in computers and sorted in new ways.' The ZIP code — short for Zone Improvement Plan — uses its first digit to indicate which region of the US a parcel is headed, the second and third to signal a nearby major city, and the final two to indicate a specific delivery area. The pace of innovation at the USPS ramped up following the introduction of the ZIP code, with many subsequent innovations building on its foundation. That includes the USPS's adoption of optical character recognition (OCR), a widely used technology that converts written or printed words into machine-readable text. In 1965, the USPS began to send large volumes of mail through OCR machines, allowing a 'digital eye' to recognize addresses and automatically sort letters. If the machine couldn't make out a person's handwriting, the USPS would send an image to a remote encoding center (REC) for human review. At one point, the USPS had as many as 55 RECs, but now only one remains in Salt Lake City, Utah. 'As our computer systems have gotten better at recognizing handwriting, we've gotten to the point where it's significantly reduced the number of letters that have to go to remote coding,' McKean says. Today, the USPS's OCR technology can read handwritten mail at nearly 98 percent accuracy, while machine-printed addresses bump its accuracy to 99.5 percent. That's thanks to advances in machine learning, which the USPS, too, has been using in the background for more than 20 years; it first started using a handwriting recognition tool in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of a 10-year modernization plan, which includes investments in technology, such as AI. However, the plan has faced criticism for raising the price of stamps and causing service disruptions in some areas. 'The Postal Service is a driver of technological change,' McKean says. 'It's hard to overstate the amount of technology that the Postal Service has been involved in either popularizing or innovating over the last 250 years.'
CBC
04-07-2025
- Health
- CBC
Thousands of letters to patients sat unclaimed in community mailboxes for a year, NLHS says
Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services says it is sifting through about 20,000 pieces of returned mail sent to patients and suppliers that ended up unclaimed in community mailboxes for over a year instead. "We recognize that many of the letters that were sent out and returned back to us were intended for our patients and the recipients of our services," Tina Edmonds, interim vice-president of quality and learning health systems at NLHS, told CBC News. "So we acted quickly to ensure patient risk was mitigated." The health authority relies largely on Canada Post to deliver appointment notices. Edmonds said NLHS has launched a review process and has made it a priority, given the volume of returned mail and the fact that it was in community mailboxes for an extended period of time. "As soon as we started receiving mail, programs and services began reviewing the mail in their areas to determine if [there were] any missed appointments or delayed communications or other patient impacts," Edmonds said. "No patient impact has been identified thus far, and it really seems to be localized mainly in the Eastern-Urban area." That zone includes the greater St. John's region – Conception Bay South and all communities east of the town, from Witless Bay up to Pouch Cove, except for Bell Island. Edmonds said NLHS was told by Canada Post last month that the mail was delivered to community mailboxes but not retrieved by the intended recipients. It remained in those mailboxes for over a year because nobody claimed ownership. A "significant quantity" was returned to the health authority on June 12. "It was a Canada Post issue," Edmonds said. "The root cause of the issue wasn't a systems breakdown within Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services." Canada Post says strike contributed to backlog In a statement to CBC News, Canada Post cited last fall's labour disruption as a contributing factor. "We prioritized sending out current mail and parcels to ensure they reached recipients in a timely manner," Canada Post spokesperson Lisa Liu wrote in an email to CBC News. That resulted in a backlog of return-to-sender (RTS) pieces of mail that had yet to be processed and sent back to the original sender. According to Canada Post, work is now underway to address the issue. "To expedite processing, we have implemented additional capacity enhancements that have resulted in bulk volumes being returned to the original sender," Liu wrote. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank customers for their patience and understanding as we continue to work through processing RTS mail." Items are returned to sender if the address doesn't contain enough information, for example, or if the person receiving it has moved without providing a forwarding address. Phone lines for patients to update contact information, air concerns According to Edmonds, NLHS acknowledges this situation is an opportunity for "systems improvement." She stressed the importance of patients updating their contact information with NLHS, and said there is also a number for people to call if they have concerns they may have missed an appointment. To update your patient contact information with NLHS, call 1-877-336-4170. You need your MCP card when you call. For patient and family concerns, call the patient relations office at 1-877-444-1399. Edmonds said NLHS has a new health system scheduled to go online next April, which will allow people to log on and update their information there. That has the potential to significantly reduce the issue of returned mail. And the new system will also have "some functionality in terms of appointment scheduling." Some programs — such as medical imaging — currently have automated reminder systems in place. But generally, appointment notices continue to go out by mail.
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Thousands of letters to patients sat unclaimed in community mailboxes for a year, NLHS says
Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services says it is sifting through about 20,000 pieces of returned mail sent to patients and suppliers that ended up unclaimed in community mailboxes for over a year instead. "We recognize that many of the letters that were sent out and returned back to us were intended for our patients and the recipients of our services," Tina Edmonds, interim vice-president of quality and learning health systems at NLHS, told CBC News. "So we acted quickly to ensure patient risk was mitigated." The health authority relies largely on Canada Post to deliver appointment notices. Edmonds said NLHS has launched a review process and has made it a priority, given the volume of returned mail and the fact that it was in community mailboxes for an extended period of time. "As soon as we started receiving mail, programs and services began reviewing the mail in their areas to determine if [there were] any missed appointments or delayed communications or other patient impacts," Edmonds said. "No patient impact has been identified thus far, and it really seems to be localized mainly in the Eastern-Urban area." That zone includes the greater St. John's region – Conception Bay South and all communities east of the town, from Witless Bay up to Pouch Cove, except for Bell Island. Edmonds said NLHS was told by Canada Post last month that the mail was delivered to community mailboxes but not retrieved by the intended recipients. It remained in those mailboxes for over a year because nobody claimed ownership. A "significant quantity" was returned to the health authority on June 12. "It was a Canada Post issue," Edmonds said. "The root cause of the issue wasn't a systems breakdown within Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services." In a statement to CBC News, Canada Post cited last fall's labour disruption as a contributing factor. "We prioritized sending out current mail and parcels to ensure they reached recipients in a timely manner," Canada Post spokesperson Lisa Liu wrote in an email to CBC News. That resulted in a backlog of return-to-sender (RTS) pieces of mail that had yet to be processed and sent back to the original sender. According to Canada Post, work is now underway to address the issue. "To expedite processing, we have implemented additional capacity enhancements that have resulted in bulk volumes being returned to the original sender," Liu wrote. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank customers for their patience and understanding as we continue to work through processing RTS mail." Items are returned to sender if the address doesn't contain enough information, for example, or if the person receiving it has moved without providing a forwarding address. According to Edmonds, NLHS acknowledges this situation is an opportunity for "systems improvement." She stressed the importance of patients updating their contact information with NLHS, and said there is also a number for people to call if they have concerns they may have missed an appointment. To update your patient contact information with NLHS, call 1-877-336-4170. You need your MCP card when you call. For patient and family concerns, call the patient relations office at 1-877-444-1399. Edmonds said NLHS has a new health system scheduled to go online next April, which will allow people to log on and update their information there. That has the potential to significantly reduce the issue of returned mail. And the new system will also have "some functionality in terms of appointment scheduling." Some programs — such as medical imaging — currently have automated reminder systems in place. But generally, appointment notices continue to go out by mail. NLHS sends 2.5 million pieces of mail per year. Officials could not immediately provide a breakdown on how much of that would be appointment notices.
CTV News
19-06-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
Morning Rush: Canadians support reducing mail delivery
Ottawa Watch Bill Carroll from the Morning Rush share his thoughts on 72% of Canadians support reducing mail delivery to three days a week.
