Today is the last day of a three-week “mail count”.

A mail count is what the Post Office uses to determine how a route is rated….and the rating determines how may days the driver has to work to make the money he or she gets to take home.

A big route….with a lot of mail….might be a “K route”….which means that the driver works 5 days every week and takes home a reasonably large paycheck.

Right now, I’m a “J”….so I work 5 days…..and then the next week, I work 6.

An “H” route is the least desirable…..you work 6 days a week every week if you run an “H route”.

During the mail count, they count all the mail that they bring you from the plant…..count all the steps you take to process it….and then use something that they call “the matrix” to determine what kind of route you have.

During this mail count, we’ve had two major weather events that made it hard to get into work….and hard to run the routes.

I wonder if it made it hard for the people who send out our mail to get it all to us?

That would be bad.

If the volume of mail was down because of the weather, it might be down enough to drive me into a less desirable section of the matrix.

I don’t want to be in a bad spot of the matrix.

So….today is the last day of the count….and I should know how it affected how the post office values what I do.

Of course, “the matrix” is completely objective. It’s supposed to be a straight count…..and what comes in is what’s evaluated.

Of course, legend and urban myth has it that during the count, mail is squirreled away until it doesn’t stand a chance of harming the Postal Service’s bottom line.

I’ve heard rumors of truckloads of mail staying on the road to avoid being introduced into the mail stream.

It all sounds like paranoid conjecture to me.

It’s strange to consider that what determines how much we make is dependent on the mail volume during a 3 week period of the year when historically the numbers are going to be low.

That’s by design….you don’t want to count when the numbers would be skewed in the driver’s favor.

You don’t want to count at Christmas, for example.

That would be crazy.

We’d all be “K routes” if they counted at Christmas.

I’ll know how this all went when the day is over.

Maybe I’ll be a different letter of the alphabet when all is said and done?

Maybe that’s the problem with the Post Office? The only thing that’s evaluated is the thing that means the least to our customers?

I know that the first commercial that said, “NOW YOU DON’T HAVE TO STAND IN LINE AT THE POST OFFICE!!” should have been a warning sign.

We’re not a bunch of robots….not trained monkeys.

It shouldn’t be a pain in the rear to interact with the people who send your letters across the country.

I don’t know if I want to interact with the Matrix again.

Yuck.