Yesterday, after completing my morning route, I was faced with this. By then it was 3 PM and I was told to deliver all this .... and then two other route's worth that had been left behind by injured or absent carriers.
You can't tell by looking at it, but that load represents approximately 200 stops over 45 miles (it's about 300 parcels. some will go to the same stop) -- some at mailboxes, many to the door. Beneath the big boxes in the two carts are hundreds of small, bubble-wrapped packages.
None of this is route-ready. What I mean is that though this is all for one route, the packages as you see them are not in route order. To put the big boxes in route order will take close to an hour (marking them and loading them into the truck).
The smaller packages would by themselves take close to another hour to put in route order.
By the time I got the big boxes loaded, it was evident that I couldn't fit them all into the truck. About 5-10 of the biggest ones would have to be left behind.
So....should I waste yet another hour to put the small packages into route order when they wouldn't fit in the truck anyway? Seemed the logical thing to do with the clock ticking and everything needing to be delivered or scanned by 9 PM was to get out of the office and deliver what I had loaded.
Delivering what I had loaded still took until 7:45.
The supervisor called me while out on the route asking why I left the rest behind.
"Because they wouldn't fit in the truck."
"Oh."
She was concerned because I had made the choice to try to deliver as many big boxes as I could -- preparing for the eventuality that it wasn't all going to get delivered anyway, and if it was a bunch of big boxes that were left, there wouldn't be room in the office for those AND what would be coming in tomorrow's Amazon dump.
To her thinking, that was the wrong choice. As a supervisor she sees the daily parcel load as numbers on her computer. And to her the 200 small parcels in the carts look like more left behind than the 100+ bigger parcels I thought it better (volume-wise) to get out of the way.
She has to report to superiors even further separated from the actual physical workings of the delivery operation who see things this simply: They should be able to say, "Deliver all this!" and by mere force of their command, all physical laws would vanish, and the parcels should, by force of their will, be delivered.
Failure to do so comes down to simply this: The carriers aren't working hard enough.
