[buymycards]

Since most of the Post Office threads lately have been about problems, I thought I would expand everyone's knowledge of Postal Operations. I would bet that the new Postmaster General doesn't have a clue about these items.

Here are some things that you probably don’t know about the Post Office, even some of you Postal employees who work in the city won’t know this.

I live in a small city of 3000, and our local Post Office also serves another 2000 rural customers, many of whom are farmers, so out here in the boondocks, we deal with several types of deliveries that many larger PO’s don’t ever see. Here we go:

Baby chicks: when I walk into work in the morning, I sometimes hear “cheep, cheep, cheep”. No, it isn’t my employees describing me. It is the sound of baby chicks. They come from another state, usually 50 or so in a large flat box, and we often receive several boxes of them at a time. Usually, the truck that brings them to us has them riding in the cab, with the AC turned on, to help them survive. By the time we get them, they are hungry and thirsty, so there were many times when I personally drove out into the country to deliver them. Sometimes when we received them, several were dead, and the smell was bad.

We also receive baby pheasants, baby quail, and baby ducks and geese.

Live crickets: this occurs mostly during the ice fishing season. The local bait shops order crickets and several types of worms through the mail, and we deliver them to the local businesses. We are very careful about temperature control, and we generally call the bait shop so they can come in and pick them up. Yes, the crickets can be very noisy. The worms are polite and quiet.

Full grown roosters and chickens: There are several groups around the county who raise rare and expensive roosters and chickens. They take them to county fairs, and poultry shows and competitions. They buy and sell them, and send them through the mail. Some of them are worth several thousand dollars, so when we receive one, we give it the VIP treatment. We also receive full grown ducks and geese.

Bees: Bees are a big industry, and we transport many bees through the mail. The queens arrive in a small wooden box, with the box being a little smaller than a pack of cigarettes. The queens are expensive, so we need to treat them well. We also receive wooden crates, usually about 15” square, with wire on the open sides. There are 1000’s of bees inside of this wire box, and if they wanted to, they could easily escape, but there is a queen deep inside the box, so the worker bees stay right with the queen. Many times, local bees will attach themselves to the hive during transportation. We generally call the customer to come and pick them up, because it could be dangerous to put them in the carrier's car for delivery.

Also, for the bait shops, we occasionally receive live frogs and lizards, but we don’t receive a lot of them.

Rick - retired Postmaster