Subscribe to Postage Due:

From FedBizOpps.com: 

The U.S. Postal Service is conducting market research to identify companies with an interest and capability to provide a mail stowage and retrieval system for its delivery fleet of Long-Life Vehicles (LLV). This will be done in conjunction with implementation of a new Flats Sequencing System (FSS) program whereby large envelopes, magazines, catalogs and circulars will be sorted for letter carriers who must now manually sequence the mail before leaving the office for their routes. As the FSS program is implemented, the plan is to purchase mail stowage and retrieval systems for up to 18,000 LLVs. Deployment would start July 2008 with delivery completed by July 2010.

The LLV mail stowage and retrieval system will be used to assist in loading and unloading mail in the delivery sequence of the route. The system should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate all mail trays (letter/flats) and parcels, and light enough to have only minimal impact on the load carrying capacity of the vehicle. An average daily volume of mail handled by a letter carrier will consist of approximately 18 trays of mail (Letter/FSS flat trays) and 12 parcels. During peak volume periods, the daily volume of mail could be 25% to 50% higher on an infrequent basis.

Subscribe to Postage Due:

USPS Media Advisory: 

Americans will place more than 900 million pieces of mail with the U.S. Postal Service on Monday, Dec. 18, the busiest mailing day of the year. About 280 million pieces of that total will be cards and letters. This is an increase of about 230 million in volume over the average mailing day.

The Postal Service also is seeing a dramatic increase in holiday mail to military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the first 14 days in December, there have been 12 more 747 cargo aircraft dispatched with mail to the Middle East than during the same period last year. That is almost an extra 747 lift a day every day. Last year, the Postal Service delivered more than 10.5 million pounds of mail to military installations overseas during the holiday period. This year, more than 16 million pounds of mail have been delivered since Nov. 1.

What/ When:
Monday, Dec. 18 - Busiest mailing day of the year
Wednesday, Dec. 20 - Busiest delivery day of the year

Where:
37,000 Post Offices and stations
269 Processing and Distribution Centers
15 million Post Office Boxes
Blue street collection boxes
251,038 delivery routes
Your home or business

Who:
700,000 Postal Service employees across the country
Postmasters, retail clerks, letter carriers, distribution center employees, call center operators, Postal Service executives

In person: Visit a local Post Office
Arrangements can be made by contacting media representatives in local markets. Go to USPS.com and click on the Holiday Press Room. Once inside, click on the “USPS Local Media Contact” sheet. Contacts are listed alphabetically by state.

Online:
Information on free package pickup, customized postage, greeting cards, shipping options, stamps, forwarding or holding mail
Visit USPS.com/holiday for customer convenience
Visit the Holiday Press Room at USPS.com for fact sheets, numbers, PDFs and press releases

B-Roll:
DVD of package volume, mail being processed, slates of packing tips
Call 202.278.3118

Audio:
MP3 downloads on packing tips, letters being processed, packages being sorted, Post Office lobby nat sound, packing and wrapping
Go online: USPS.com, click on the Holiday Press Room

Subscribe to Postage Due:

Yesterday’s DMM Advisory from the US Postal Service:

We’ve been asked if the recently passed Postal Reform legislation will have any effect on the current proposed pricing change. It will not. We are still on target for a May 2007 implementation of new prices and mailing standards. We’ll have our revised mailing standards Federal Register published in early January 2007

Subscribe to Postage Due:

A story linked to on Friday’s postalnews.com was about a letter carrier who was retiring after 37 years- the headline was ‘I got a lot of stories’. If you’re a letter carrier, you’ve probably got a story or two to tell yourself. And the same can be said of most clerks, mail handlers, supervisors and postmasters. And let’s not forget maintenance employees- some of them could write a whole comic strip about their experiences!

Postal worker and published author Jonathan Lowe would like to hear about your stories, and consider them for publication in an anthology of postal tales- here’s his request:

A book publisher I know has asked me if I’d like to compile a book of
postal stories for a book to be titled “FRAGILE, LIQUID, PERISHABLE & POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS—-True Stories From the Post Office.”  These stories would need to be either funny, unusual, or touching. Examples would be odd things found in collection boxes, odd requests for directions made of rural carriers, strange parcels presented for mailing, dog stories, stories of heroism. . .anything interesting or funny that happens in a post office or around postal workers. Entrants will get mention, plus a copy of the book when published, and they should limit the initial details to one paragraph, and provide an email address.  As editor, I will follow up on those which are the most promising for inclusion.  Submit to USPSbook@yahoo.com.

Jonathan Lowe’s books are available in the postalnews store, and you can read his reviews of audiobooks “to read while working” at Postalmag.com.

Update: According to a message on the OPM web site, the BENEFEDS sign-up system will remain open for ‘belated’ FEDVIP enrollments through next Friday, December 22. 

I finally managed to sign up for the new Federal Employee Dental and Vision Insurance Program (FEDVIP) last night. For the last couple of weeks, the sign-up site, www.benefeds.com, has more often than not displayed error messages suggesting users try back during low volume periods. Unfortunately, the same error message tended to show up during those periods, too. Getting into the site didn’t always guarantee a successful sign-up, either. On four occasions, I got through the first dozen or so screens only to have the site freeze, meaning I had to start again from scratch. (Incredibly, the FEDVIP system requires users to enter all of their personal data when signing up rather than simply linking to data already stored in FEHBP or agency databases). BENEFEDS claims that this problem is due to firewalls used by the employees’ agencies, but I ran into the same problem at home, which would disprove that idea.

Although open season officially ended Monday, the sign-up system’s failure means that sign-ups are still being accepted, at least through today.

You can’t blame this fiasco on the USPS IT department- FEDVIP is run by the Bush Administration’s Office of Personnel Management, which contracted out the service to a joint venture owned by Met Life and John Hancock- apparently Halliburton was busy? And in vintage Bushspeak, the error message that appeared so often attributed the site’s failure not to incompetence or poor planning, but to its “tremendous success”!

Another ‘Mission Accomplished’! Heckuva job OPM!

Northeast Area Vice President Megan Brennan will be heading for Pittsburgh to replace Eastern AVP Al Lazaroff, whose appointment to Chief Postal Inspector was announced yesterday. Taking Brennan’s place in Windsor is  Capital District Manager Timothy C. Haney.