After all the waiting around on Saturday, you would have thought management would have scheduled enough clerks on Monday morning to distribute the mail to the carriers in a timely manner. Alas, that wasn't the case, as one of our key clerks wasn't scheduled. There wasn't as much waiting time as Saturday - only about 45 minutes today instead of the hour on Saturday. At least management is consistent.

As for volume, I know it's a tired cliche that there's never any mail during route check week, but... I'm forced to say it again: Where's the mail? We got about half the volume today that we got last Monday. Two routes were very telling. These two routes in the White Rock Lake area have million dollar homes, and usually there's mail stacked everywhere at these route's cases. Yet, both carriers were on waiting time about an hour into the morning. Now I'm not saying management cut any mail back at the plant. Perhaps, today being the first day of new rates, lower mail volume is the new reality.

From what I'm being told, there is a semi-major initiative to get post offices route checked in Dallas. Last week, four post offices were checked. This week six. And next week four more post offices are scheduled to be checked. We have postmasters as far away as northern Arkansas helping conduct these checks.

Today was my day for an examiner to check my route. I worked all the way through. I didn't hear any negative comments from my examiner about my performance. Yet, when I got back to the office, my PM supervisor angrily asked where I had been. (She isn't exactly a great motivator.) I pointed to my examiner and said if you want to know, he (the examiner) can tell you to the minute where I've been all day! It left a bad taste in my mouth, and I came home feeling dirty after being associated with the entire route check process, which isn't conducive for either carriers or management.