The mail is delivered to my house about 2 pm each day. The mailman then goes up the street, does a U-turn, and delivers mail to the opposite side of the street. I believe that he takes a break after another street or two because I often see him parked a few blocks away.
Quite often, like maybe a few times a week (that I notice), he returns to the house across the street, pulls up to the mailbox, and does something and then leaves. It looks like maybe he is scanning a bar code or using an RFID scanner. What the heck is he doing?
Does it have something to do with his break, or maybe his break ending? Is he sort of “clocking back in”, and using my neighbor’s mailbox maybe as his new start point?
The APWU is not what it used to be. My dad retired in 1994. He used to say that the only way to be fired from the Post Office was to steal from the till or punch a supervisor. And you could get away with punching your supervisor if you had a good enough reason.
It just seems to me it’s the sort of thing unions would vehemently oppose; having to prove to management that you actually were doing your job, and doing it in the prescribed time.
Sorry… I had a whole long thing written but it apparently got erased before I clicked post.
I asked my friend about it once… he’s a mail carrier. He said that the purpose wasn’t to ensure carriers were doing their job. There’s no hiding whether you’ve delivered your route or not (short of throwing the mail away). The post office already knows how many houses are on each route and they know how many items the carrier has to deliver each day. They have a formula to calculate how much time that should take.
He says the purpose of checking in is to give the post office data about what time the carriers reach specific points. It helps them to better understand if they need to change routes (ie, shift some addresses to another carrier). It also helps them be more consistent about delivering to each address at the same time each day.
My friend says that if data analysis makes a more efficient operation, it’ll help save his and he’s all for it. I’m a newspaper reporter, and we always joke about which of our jobs is going to become extinct first. I’d rather be in my shoes than his.
My husband is a letter carrier too. They’re told each morning by their supervisors how long their route should take that day, based on the mail volume for that route. (Hubby thinks that the day’s weather conditions, such as heat or snow accumulation, are not taken into account, and so they are allowed to make a case for why the numbers may be off that day.) If they’re over their allowed work time, they are asked to separate out a certain amount of the route and give it to another carrier to handle; if they are under, they’re asked how much extra time they think they will have to carry other mail, and this will be weighed against the computer’s estimate. At least once a year (IIRC), routes are evaluated by having a supervisor walk or drive the route with the carrier to check how fast it goes. I’m pretty sure there’s even a prescribed walking pace, estimate of how many seconds each stop at a house should take, and so on.
So, it gets circumvented anyway. As per the OP, the mailman returns to an address later to zap in the bar code and pretend he was only just getting there now.
If he works only 5 days a week, rather than 6, his substitute’s numbers will look much different than the regular carrier. This will get noticed eventually, especially when his route gets inspected.
Alternately, it could be a scan indicating “returning from lunch” and that is the closest available bar code to his post-lunch starting point. Relatively few spots on routes are barcoded.