The convening in a parking lot may have just been a lunch break.
As for transferring packages, a lot of times if someone is running behind on their route, the office will authorize them to transfer half an hour or an hour (routes are pieced together by time it takes to deliver them) to another carrier. That is almost certainly what you saw – a carrier taking some packages from another one because the first one was behind deadline.
Source: Husband is a mail carrier.
Yeah, that really drives the postal rates up. High cost of ammo, you know.
If that’s true, Wow. In what world do we live in where Postal Service guys are subject to more scrutiny and more sever consequences than your average cop?
Your average cop is a city or county employee. Postal workers are federal employees (or near enough).
Seriously. Some asshole threw some mail in a ditch, and these people are seriously giving us the Thanks, Obama! routine. Good god.
At least he was only dumping packages…
I was a summer substitute carrier a long time ago, and I know the postal inspectors watched me - I got a report on what I was doing. Which was not throwing away mail. Back then anyhow I knew that this stuff was treated very seriously, though even back then you read about one or two people who just stashed all the mail someplace without delivering it.
It wouldn’t surprise me that with the current budget problems they had to cut back on inspectors, another great example of how Congress makes things worse by supposedly saving money.
The guy who trained me spent the first part of the morning eating breakfast and the last part of the afternoon in a bar, but he sure as hell delivered all his mail in between.
Wonderful!
Tampering with the mail is a federal offense, even if you are a postal worker. Not only did he not deliver it, but he potentially destroyed it.
I’ve seen other videos of postal workers dumping mail into dumpsters and other places. So I wouldn’t be surprised if most lost mail and packages disappeared this way and weren’t genuinely misdelivered or damaged by the machines or ended up in the dead letter office.
ETA: I thought this seemed familiar, just noticed it was a few months old.
FWIW, I worked in a post office one Christmas, and the undeliverable-mail sack was full of food items that had lost their mailing labels. It all went to the undeliverable-mail office: none of it stayed with us.
I’m not surprised.
My uncle works for the Post Office, and he says that, on his first day, one of the older employees was assigned to show him the ropes. This employee told him, “Here’s your first and most important lesson- see this?” He pointed to a package marked FRAGILE. My uncle said, “Yeah?” The employee picked up the package, held it over his head, and slammed it as hard as he could on the ground.
I’ve heard that too, from my former postal employee stepfather. One of his colleagues was also once taken to court for throwing packages away, caught on film; no idea what sentence he got. All his former colleagues hated him because he caused them a ton of extra work in superfluous checks for two years afterwards and it would not have been nice to have been him.