POST OFFICE ROUTES TEMPORARILY ‘OUT OF WHACK’ DURING REALIGNMENT

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

Delivering the mail through rain, sleet and dark of night is a slogan the United States Postal Service tries to live up to, and in the past few days in Pine Bluff, the dark of night part has been especially appropriate.

Last week, some carriers were reportedly still delivering mail after 11 p.m., a situation caused by a realignment of existing routes.

Pine Bluff Postmaster Pamela Thomas said postal authorities decided that Pine Bluff would be the guinea pigs, the first city in the state to have routes realigned with computers drawing up the new boundary lines for each route.

“Right now, the routes are out of whack,” Thomas said. “We’re charged with doing our best to deliver every piece of mail every day and we hope to get this lined out in the next couple of days.”

Thomas said that while the postal service realigns routes every four to five years, this is the first time that the new routes were laid out by a computer, instead of human workers.

As an example, Thomas cited mail destined for Office Machine Inc. (OMI), which is at Eighth Avenue and Main Street, directly across from the main post office downtown.

“That used to be right at the start of route 4, so the letter carrier would make his delivery first thing in the morning. Now, OMI is at the end of route three so it might be the afternoon,” she said.

Thomas explained that letter carriers are having to learn areas they might not be familiar with, “and it’s costing us a lot of overtime hours while they do that.”

In addition, she said the volume of mail has picked up this month, with more sale papers and circulars that the letter carriers have to deliver as the holidays approach, and she predicted that the volume would continue to increase next month, with lots of Christmas cards and packages entering the system.

“Fortunately, a lot of our customers have been very understanding about this, and hopefully, we will be back on track by the time those cards and packages start to arrive,” Thomas said.

As far as the late night deliveries are concerned, she said she hoped that would be only a temporary situation for carriers.

“Our goal is to get them back in here before it gets dark if we can,” Thomas said.