by Jess McCuan / photos by Rebecca D'Angelo

Yes, they deliver mail through rain, sleet and snow, and yes, they get chased by dogs. “When you’ve been bitten, it’s not so funny,” says Cindy Kent, an Asheville letter carrier for almost 20 years who carries a dog repellent spray called Back Off when she delivers mail on foot. Postal workers face other occupational hazards too—like drunken customers, lonely chatterbox customers and customers who become irate when they learn they have to pay for tape. And yet none of these women “go postal”—even in December when they work harder than Santa Claus, making sure some 60 million letters, cards, parcels and packages show up at everyone’s doorstep on time. (Usually, their only day off in December is Christmas Day.) “The volume is just incredible,” says Angela Curtis, who manages the 153,000-square-foot processing and distribution facility for all mail in Western North Carolina. Cindy Kent says that, despite the strain, she loves working the holidays—especially when she can watch a person’s face light up when she delivers a package they were not expecting. Her holidays would be even happier if Ashevilleans would leash their rottweilers.  

Joylyne Lunsford, 54, letter carrier, 22 years with the postal serviceAt some point during a secretarial program at A-B Tech in the mid-‘80s, Joy Lunsford decided she couldn’t be a secretary. “They mentioned making coffee,” she says. “They said you’d have to get know who your boss was and how he does memos. I said, that would be hard. I don’t want to be a secretary.” Lunsford, who grew up in Honolulu and served three years in the army, was also uneasy about dressing up, which she’d heard secretaries had to do. When the postal service called with an open position, “it was like a blessing,” she says. “A uniform sounded right up my alley.” 

The families on her East Asheville delivery route often do nice things for her at the holidays, but whether they know it or not, Lunsford gives them small gifts year-round. When a letter is short on postage, especially just a few cents, she pays it. Once, during tax season, she saw a letter addressed to the IRS returned for insufficient postage, and she knew the senders wouldn’t make the April 15 deadline. “I knew they were gone. I just went ahead and put the postage on it. I didn’t even tell them about it, I just did it,” she says. 

All she asks in return is that people tell her when they move. Lunsford, a stickler for accuracy, says it’s her pet peeve that people pack up without letting her know what do with their mail. Maybe they don’t actually want to receive their bills and junk mail, but she doesn’t want to get stuck with them either. When she first started delivering mail, people didn’t seem to move quite as much, and when they did, she knew where they were going. “Now people aren’t staying at the same place long. Naturally, there are four different names that go to one address,” she says. 

 

Barbara Buzzell, 48, clerk, 21 years with the postal service.

In Barbara Buzzell’s first few weeks on the job, she had dreams about ZIP codes. Though she scored a perfect 100 on the test given to potential employees, her first assignment was to sit at a colossal sorting machine called an LSM, punching ZIP code keys as letters flew by in a chute at a rate of one per second. “I’d never worked in a factory setting,” says the mother of two, who had previously worked in accounting for a hotel chain. “Working around so many people and going to lunch exactly when they tell you. It just took some getting used to.” 

What takes getting used to, now that she’s a counter clerk in downtown Asheville, is dealing with the public. Occasionally, the customers are drunk. Or they linger in line and ask Buzzell on dates. “Some people are lonely,” she says. “They’re just there to chat.” Her pet peeve: people who get mad about paying for tape. “I’d love to just bring tape so people could use my tape,” she says, though the postal service prohibits this because it sells tape to customers. “People get very aggravated when you tell them the tape and the box aren’t free.” 

Overall, however, she thoroughly enjoys helping people get letters and packages to the right place at the right time, and she’s been at the same station long enough to identify the customers who need special assistance. For example, some do not know how to read or write. “You can help a lot of people just by getting the bills in the mail,” she says. “I try to recognize them so that they’re not embarrassed. You try to be really sensitive to their needs.” 

Angela Curtis, 43, plant manager, 15 years with the postal service.

Angela Curtis, who worked her way up from a part-time letter carrier job in Hickory, couldn’t be prouder of her plant, which processes every piece of mail in Western North Carolina. She’s only been plant manager since June of last year, but in the second quarter of 2008, the sprawling facility, near the WNC Farmer’s Market on Brevard Road, got an award for the best overnight service of any distribution plant in the country. Curtis, born in Lenoir, North Carolina, worked in management for the clothing chains Maurices and Goody’s and then got her MBA. She wants to someday be the U.S. Postmaster General (basically, the CEO of the postal service). “We just have to run this company like a business,” she says. One challenge is that, when fuel prices go up, it hits the postal service harder than private delivery companies. “We’re not like UPS or FedEx—we can’t just add a fuel surcharge,” she notes. A fond memory from her letter carrier days was wearing a Santa hat and hand-delivering packages on Christmas Day.

Cindy Kent, 53, letter carrier, 19 years with the postal service.

You might think a letter carrier’s job would be to carry letters. But it’s much more complicated, says Kent, who was born in Indiana and joined up with the postal service after secretarial and bookkeeping jobs. In the mornings, especially around the holidays, she might walk in to see mail stacked four or five feet high, and it’s her job to sort it before she begins her route. “The parcels are unreal,” she says. “It’s chaos that becomes something highly organized…you’ve got thousands of pieces of mail to put up and to be accurate before you can even get out on the street and deliver. People don’t see that—they see you and say, why are you late?”

Still, the holidays can be fun for a carrier. For the most part, “you are the deliverer of good tidings,” she says. At one condo complex of mostly seniors, she knows most of the residents in the building and relishes hearing their stories. One day, a man approached her and asked for a hug. He had just gotten word that his wife had cancer. “He cried on my shoulder,” she says. “For him to feel that comfortable—it was very rewarding. You watch the children growing up. You hear funny stories from people, or sad stories. Being able to connect with your people is just priceless.”