Easier than the first. Turns out yesterday was about as difficult as it got since I was able to experience express mail, certified, advertisement flyers and 3rd bundle advertisements (ads you have to manually sort into your pile as you walk). Basically, walking around all day with 3-4 separate stacks of mail that you combine into one address and move on at each stop. Today there was none of that. Just grab a bundle, walk your route and as a result we finished 2 hours early.

Cool facts I've learned:

A lot of mail is sorted by machine through OCR. Massive belt systems take care of anything that is letter sized and scans it to figure out where to send it. This used to be done by hand, but obviously computers have changed a lot of things in every field. Now a computer has taken that job and as a result, instead of people sorting 1 or less letters per second, it can scan and sort 13 letters per second! Anything it can't figure out, it puts those fluorescent orange barcodes you may have seen on the back of it and sends the picture of the scan to an operator who then decides what the text says. The letter eventually makes it through the system again and when the orange barcode is found, it looks up to find what the operator told it to do with that particular piece and finally sends it on it's proper way. So any letter you see with those orange barcodes on the back of it, the OCR failed for one reason or another and someone had to manually take a look at it. This usually happens with hand written letters, but even then it sometimes is able to figure those out. However, it even happens with perfectly legible, typed letters. Perhaps the address was behind one of those plastic windows in an envelope and somehow enough glare formed that it couldn't read the address as it was scanning it.

Junk mail is just that to most people, but it's called job security there. It may be a pain to deal with, especially those coupon flyers with the pages that constantly fall out, but if it wasn't for them the cost of a stamp would be far greater than what it is now. You know what happens when people complain about high prices.

The date that's stamped on a piece of mail to cancel the postage is the day the sender put it in the mail. Any and all mail sent (put in a mailbox, collection box or in person at the post office) on a certain day will be postmarked by 8 or 8:30 that night. So let's say, oh I don't know… “someone” who only lives a few miles from you, within the same city, tells you on February 15, 2005 that they already put a check in the mail for you and it should be arriving at your house with today's mail. That day passes and no mail arrives. Hmm… did it get lost? Perhaps. We'll have to wait and see for tomorrow. The next day comes and that mail with the check in it arrives, only you notice that the postmarked date on is February 15, 2005. You have just learned that this person has yet again lied their ass off to you and they didn't in fact mail anything during any appropriate business hour prior to them speaking with you the day before.

Speaking of making the deadline to get mail in a delivery box for any given day, most of those boxes that say collection time is at 1:30 M-F, most of the time aren't picked up until the end of the day. There's one (and only one) on the route I've been on the past two days that says 1:30 and we don't get it until we head in for the day. So yesterday it was 5:30, today it was 3:30. Of course, that's no guarantee for all of them, but you've definitely got some leeway with the posted times.