# Is There Anything I Can Do About A Lousy Mailman?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-anything-i-can-do-about-a-lousy-mailman/481098>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 13, 2009, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-anything-i-can-do-about-a-lousy-mailman/481098 "2009-01-13T14:53:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 9

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [January 13, 2009, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-anything-i-can-do-about-a-lousy-mailman/481098/9 "2009-01-13T19:41:49Z")

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> [@Lykaios](#):
>
> Happ
> 
> I work as a supervisor at the USPS plant in Oklahoma City, specifically with sorting mail into delivery order. If you’re having such a problem that you can’t trust important mail to be delivered to your house, then we need to go about seeing what we can do to get this resolved. Carriers are held accountable for misdelivering the mail, and I can most likely put you in contact with your carriers supervisor or the postmaster for the station. If you’ll let me know your zipcode i can find out the phone number and who you need to talk to. If you would prefer email, private message me and I’ll give you an email to see it’s forwarded to the appropriate person.
> 
> Good Luck  
> Lykaios

Can I hijack for question? Nearly 40 years ago I was a summer sub carrier, and did lots of different routes. This was long before barcodes and automatic sorting of addresses. They never let me sort the mail into delivery order, which was good since I would have started the route about noon some days. What’s the process nowadays? Back then there were little cubbyholes, two addresses per, and you sorted left or right. How much is automatically sorted into delivery order, and how much is manual? Does the OCR sometimes miss things, or are Ss and 5s sometimes confused?

To the others: back when I did it, my office at least was very serious about delivering the mail quickly and accurately. I know the postal inspectors watched me at least one day. The mistakes we see are either things sticking together, or letters addressed to the same number, different street. If a missort is in the middle of a stack of letters, it is very likely not going to be noticed.

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