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From the annals of the Brookline PD: The case of the overdressed mailman
By adamg on Thu, 07/18/2019 - 11:34am
Wicked Local Brookline's latest summary of Brookline 911 calls includes:
At 5:37 p.m. police received a report of a mail carrier who was overdressed for the weather and loitering in the area, not delivering mail.
Also, some ruffians were spotted skateboarding down the street, throwing ceramic plates on the ground. And a turkey attacked an elderly woman and a small puppy.
Neighborhoods:
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Comments
a loitering mailman?!?
what a miserable place to live
It does seem like USPS has
It does seem like USPS has been operating like Uber lately, where the closest person grabs a bag of mail and sets off. I get about 3-4 different mail carriers a week now, and maybe 1 will be wearing any part of a uniform (usually just the pants).
I also had one mark my package as not deliverable because he "was looking for [my] house all day!" Which means none of my complex would have gotten mail delivered if I hadn't called the post office within a half hour of tracking my package.
Letter carriers have high turnover rate
and many more are retiring. And they are often replaced first with newbies. These folks are not 'regular' USPS employees. They are (usually) rehired, year by year. At some point, usually at the 3 year mark, they're 'converted' to regular, and start making higher 'regular' pay.
Understand, there are all kinds of jobs available at USPS, and 'regular' employees routinely 'bid' and change jobs. The big $O.T.$ is in very large facilities, especially in Automation. Boston has one of the largest such distribution facilities in the country at Ft. Point Channel.
It's called summer vacation
Or your post office has HR issues.
I've had 2 regular letter carriers in the roughly 15 years I've lived where I live. The first one was very social. The current one is social enough.
Back in college, people I knew used to work for the post office over the summer. They'd cover routes while the regular carrier was on vacation. It seems you learn a lot delivering mail, like the pros and cons of apartment buildings.
SMH
I take it the retirements haven't hit your PO yet. When they do, things will change and not for the better.
In some areas, the postmasters have not been replaced and everything is running on some sort of broken autopilot. Packages meant to be overnight shipped sit for two days before going to Logan. Delivery couriers mark "bad address" on half the packages and return them to sender so that they won't have to deal with the 2 block walk or drive to deliver them.
Your experience is not typical - you have just been lucky and it probably won't last.
Then I guess it's true
Roslindale is the Promised Land.
Thank God the police were
Thank God the police were notified before he started minding his own business.
Did they call the fashion
Did they call the fashion police or what?
Boston is not Brookline
It's Pawnee vs Eagleton
I am waiting for a complaint like....
“I found a sandwich in one of your parks, and I want to know why it didn’t have mayonnaise"
I have heard there is little
I have heard there is little that can be done by municipal police concerning postal employees due to their federal status, but I doubt too a call to the postal inspector would have shed any more light on this situation.
Whats more concerning to me is the report about the transit police telling somebody to call Brookline police about T buses going into the cycle lane. Clearly it should have been fielded by the transit police, not punted. Very crass. Maybe they will get on the ball if Brookline starts ticketing buses after this.
Ok I'm following you, but at
Ok I'm following you, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if Brookline even needs police, or if they could just get by with one of those grocery store robots and that fake police car cutout from the cape.
Don't forget the cardboard officer
from the Alewife bike cage.
Mailmen, Brookline and the great pearl clutchers
Yes, we all enjoy razzing Brookline (where I live) - I do it as well, like how they do more to prevent Styrofoam cup use than homelessness, but I digress..
The mail carriers in north brookline, from a service standpoint, are terrible. On a good day, we get our mail between 4-5, and I live 2 blocks from the post office. For the overdressed mailman (maybe he wasn't wearing shorts) more than once in the Boston area, I've seen homeless guys wearing a postman jacket - believe it or not, if you have that you can actually get into some more 'isolated' areas so if you wanted to sleep or get access somewhere. I'm not talking about social engineering on a grand scale, but if a dude with a mailman's uniform is going inside an apartment building, you probably wouldn't question it, and he may just be a dude who is robbing the place.
In terms of mailman, my dad used to tell me a story of how in the suburbs, once a year the inspector would go out on the route with the mailman, and the mailman would take the long way around, open gates carefully, and essentially log his day as taking say 6 hours to deliver mail, but in reality, they would take shortcuts, throw packages onto the lawn and be done in 3, then spend the rest of the day drinking at the local VFW / Veterans post.
I'm not saying it was true for all mailman, but my dad was right about a lot of other stuff that I wrote off as folksy bigotry or right of center opinions when in fact, most of it were true.
In short - could have been a mailman, could have been a homeless dude, could have been a dude in a blue jacket.
i thought it was just my mail person
I live behind an AmVets post and pretty much every Saturday from about noon until 3 there's a mail truck (one of the small ones) tucked behind the building while s/he hangs out inside. Huh!
In defense of the caller in Brookline...
I have no idea how 'out of place' the person looked. Was he wearing a winter coat and a USPS knit hat? Was he hanging out in an awkward spot like directly behind a dumpster? Was the "overdressed" USPS uniform or other clothing?
If I saw an apparent letter carrier that I felt was out of place, I'd be concerned that the person was a package stealer.
Not sure
Not sure about the over dressed part but Florida a lot of the mail carriers take lunch and or breaks by just parking in a lot and resting. Remember most of these people are on their feet all shift.