Know the code
What's the most important thing for people to remember when mailing a letter or package? Use a ZIP code.
"Some will use the correct street, and not a ZIP code, and some will use the correct city and state, but no ZIP code," said Gainesville Postmaster Leo Helme. "And then they wonder why it's not delivered."
When there's no ZIP code, Helme said, the mail has to be sorted by hand, increasing delivery time - or making it impossible to deliver at all.
In many neighborhoods these days, residents might know the people who live next door, or a few families down the street.
But there's a person who travels through those neighborhoods every day and knows every single one of them.
They know when a baby has arrived. They know when birthdays are celebrated. They even know when bills are past due.
It's the letter carrier.
Every day - except Sunday - U.S. Postal Service employees take to the streets delivering millions of letters, flyers and packages. And each letter carrier gets a unique window into each person's life, one stamped item at a time.
Take Gainesville letter carrier Phyllis Mote.
Most mornings, an hour or two before lunchtime, Mote loads up her Postal Service truck and heads over to Seasons on Lanier, a Gainesville subdivision, where she starts her mail-
delivery route. She's already spent time sorting letters into one flat box and loading store circulars and other odd-sized items in other boxes.
Then, she guides her truck to the first mailbox on the route.
With a quick click of the mailbox door, she's on to the next house.
"I've been carrying the same route for, next year will be 14 years," Mote said, adding that she's had her route longer than anyone at the Gainesville post office.
And after 14 years, all those house numbers start to stick in your brain.
"Many of us, when we see a name, we can tell you the address. It's just something that sticks in your mind when you carry a route," she said. "We're really good at phone numbers for that reason."
Driving the route is calming - there is a slow precision to the drive with lots of gentle stops and starts. Down the street, occasionally, there is a neighbor or two standing at the end of their driveway, waiting for Mote and his or her bundle of mail.
"I like this lady ... she's sweet," said Maya Fisher, who has lived in Seasons for about a year but is originally from Germany. "I ran after her one time with a piece of mail I didn't get in the box."
"Yeah, yeah, I always stop for running people," Mote countered.
Because the postal grapevine winds through the development, Mote found out recently a neighbor down the street was injured in a fall.
"How is she? I heard that she fell and had an accident," Mote asked.
"Yes. I wanted to send her a cheer-up note," Fisher said.
"So, she's doing OK? I heard that yesterday."
"She's coming this afternoon for a little coffee klatch."
These days, the mail load is lighter than just a few weeks ago, when she had easily double the amount of mail. On this day, just three flat boxes of mail sit next to her in the truck.
Gainesville Postmaster Leo Helme said the trend in delivering mail is headed toward driving, rather than walking. Today, because of the way suburban developments are constructed, it's more efficient to drive to each house rather than park and walk from house to house, he said.
"Most of them do drive rather than walk," he said. "It's the wave of the future."
But just because Mote and other letter carriers are driving doesn't mean they're not enjoying the great outdoors on their route, too.
Although, sometimes it's more than they expect.
"We get a lot of birds that fly in the truck because if there's a mailbox, underneath there a lot of times they'll make a nest in there under the box," she said.
And unfortunately, not all the animals are alive.
"One of the most unusual things I've found in a box was a bunch of dead fish," she said. "It was horrible - I opened the box and I was like, ‘Bleah!' Somebody was mad at somebody else for them to do that," she said.
"Just in the last few months I opened this lady's door to the mailbox - big box - I opened the box to put in the mail and I thought, ‘Huh,'" Mote added. "I looked and I thought, ‘What did I just lay that mail on top of?' I looked and I said, "Eww!' Somebody had put a dead squirrel in her box."
Then, sometimes it's not about what's in the box but simply just getting to it.
John Whalen was the first resident to move into Seasons on Lanier, and at that time, according to mail carriers, he didn't exist.
"Before the post office even knew we were here, she found us," Whalen said. "There was nobody here - she came in the construction gate, right here, came down the street, delivered to one or two houses here and then went back out again."
Mote remembers that, too.
"UPS had sent some stuff back saying there was no such number," she said.
Whalen is one of hundreds of customers Mote passes in a day. And yet, she said, she can keep most of them straight in her head.
She can remember where some work, or where some go to school. When asked about this stewardship of people's information, she just shakes her head.
In general, she said, it's just a matter of delivering the mail.
"I've got a lot of people who I've carried for for so long that I know when their birthdays are and I send them cards," she said. "Especially if it's near my birthday. I have a customer on the next street who has a birthday the day after mine, and he always says, ‘I don't know how you can remember my birthday,' and I say, ‘Day after mine! It's very easy for me to remember your birthday.'"