Wednesday, December 17, 2003
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Wednesday, December 17, 2003 |
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Local post offices deluged on busiest day By JOHN MUNFORD Last week, U.S. postal leaders declared Monday would be the service’s busiest of the year. At Fayette’s five facilities the public didn’t disappoint. Fayetteville, Tyrone Peachtree City and Brooks post offices each had lines extending out of the service counter area and into the main lobby at various times of the day. At the sorting facility in central Fayette, 290,000 pieces of mail were processed Monday on their way to destinations in all of Fayette County, Fairburn, Palmetto, Union City, Senoia and Tyrone. As Christmas day looms ever closer, local residents will hustle to the post office in hopes of getting holiday gifts to loved ones. Locally, carriers will even be delivering on Christmas Day, said Dan Honea, officer in charge of the Fayetteville and Peachtree City post offices. “Even on Christmas Day we’ll be out delivering anything that looks like Christmas,” Honea said. That includes fruit, express mail packages and “obvious presents,” Honea said. “We try to put that out up until the last minute, kinda like Santy Claus,” Honea added. Although dealing with long lines at the customer service counter is stressful, employees try to stay pleasant with each other and the customer, said Honea, who has 47 years in the business. In Peachtree City, carriers ran an early route to deliver packages before coming back to run their regular routes. Jerry Sparks, manager of customer service for the Peachtree City Post Office, said the counter area had lines out the door since it opened at 8 a.m. “Everybody has been real good,” Sparks said of the customers. An employee at the door to the counter area helped speed up the process for some customers who needed to insure their packages and fill out other paperwork, he said. Behind the scenes in Peachtree City, Gayle Reid was a one-woman sorting machine. She would separate colored envelopes that the machine may or may not be able to read the address from. She’d divvy out the outgoing packages into different metal bins which are loaded directly on the trucks to be flown out of state. Packages destined for the local area including Atlanta are set aside in other bins so they can be delivered more quickly. The hustle and bustle of Fayetteville’s sorting room was undeniable just before lunchtime as workers sorted letters onto shelves for delivery. Piles of packages in a variety of shapes and sizes were also sorted here, both incoming and outgoing. Brooks Postmaster Myra Bell said the tiny town showed up in force to mail packages and letters Monday. Town resident Daryl Mathews, who counted five people in the small counter area there, said it was as crowded as he remembered it being in a long time, if not ever. “It’s been hectic,” Bell said. In the minutes before closing time, it seems she knows just about everybody who pulls up to her counter. She is also well aware of folks from Fayetteville who make the special trip to Brooks to avoid the holiday mailing madness. Others, like Brooks resident Marcy Gillen, appreciate Bell’s service. “She always has a smile for you and she’s always efficient,” Gillen said. Efficiency is the name of the game at the sorting facility in central Fayette, where workers load stacks of letters that are fed through a machine that reads the bar codes under the addresses on each envelope. The envelopes are carried through the machine lickety-split on a conveyor belt system that routes envelope to a specific shelf. The envelopes are sorted twice by the machines: first to divide them by carrier and a second time to put them in “walking” order for easy delivery, said Sonya Calaway, who supervises the humans feeding the machines. Nearby, other workers sort envelopes with bulging items stuffed inside as they can’t be fed through the machine. After workers arrive at 1:30 a.m., the goal is to have all the mail sorted and out the door by 8 a.m., Calaway said. If one of the three sorting machines breaks down, everybody has to turn the hustle up another notch to get everything done, she added. A full-time mechanic is on staff to get the machines back and running as quickly as possible.
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