Area’s Letter Carriers Top In Speed and Efficiency 

May 25, 2006
By Greta Sproul

 Picture it: A frigid, blustery, wind-whipped morning in the latter part of February here in the Old Town-Orono area. Despite the incessant cold and the debilitating bluster, letter carriers are out on the streets, doing what they have done ever since the inception of the United States Postal Service--delivering the mail. But not only are they making their way from house to house, bringing news, information, bills, and, yes, the inescapable junk mail, to each and every occupant, they are doing it at record speed for their district level. It is because of that speed in delivering the local mail during last February’s brisk weather that local postmaster Kevin Clark and his intrepid band of letter carriers have been acknowledged by the United States Postal Service as having made the most deliveries per hour for a level 21 post office here in the Northeast.

It’s not an acknowledgement to be taken lightly, explained Postal Service spokesman Thomas Rizzo, during a phone interview from Portland.

“The United States Postal Service is extremely adept at keeping track of how efficient its operations are,” Rizzo said. “It’s made huge improvements over the years in the speed and accuracy of the machines that read the optical characters that are used to send mail where it needs to go. In fact, 87.2 of the mail is correctly sequenced by machines, which is a mind-boggling reflection of good record-keeping, involving up to date name changes, address changes, and other individual points.”

The fact that local letter carriers are human beings and not machines is just another indication of how hard United States Postal Service employees work to deliver the mail that many of us are used to taking for granted. Rizzo points out that there are many instances in which letter carriers have done more than deliver the mail.

“I can’t tell you how many times a letter carrier has been acknowledged for an act of heroism while on the job,” he said. “Letter carriers have helped to rescue people who have had heart attacks or fallen or who are in other kinds of trouble. They’ve been known to do a lot more than just deliver letters.”

For those of us who aren’t used to thinking of our local letter carrier as a hero in a blue nylon uniform, we need only picture the cold days of last February and remember that it was because of them that our checks, bills, letters, and, yes, even our junk mail made it into our mailboxes faster than it ever had before.