Walk Out To Winter

Ecosse C285, Dave Hamster, 2009

See Christmas? Christmas is a bastard.
-Still Game, Cold Turkey (2005 Christmas Special)

It goes without saying that Christmas is an exceptional time of year at Royal Mail. It's fittingly the antipode of summer. Whereas the sunny season is so light that overtime claims are banned, December is a cash bonanza for those willing to take on as much work as possible - morning prep, doing parts of other walks, IVO, RLB, driving lorries, working your day off. If you need the money, so be it. I'm not interested in working myself to death so I only opt in for the early starts, mainly to deal with gone-aways and do the detective work required of the mal-addressed items that people continue to post every year.

Call it compulsive behaviour, but I've been keeping statistics on work since I began three and a half years ago. In processing the recorded numbers I wanted to see if there was a demonstrable surge in volume during Christmas. I also wanted to compare it to my previous two Decembers on delivery, but as I'm on a different (and heavier) walk the answer would be 'yes' anyway. The general consensus is that this year was the heaviest in a long time - most likely due to the prolonged snowfall disrupting transport. In graphing the data I've juxtaposed December with the two surrounding months, November 1st 2010 to January 29th 2011, to give a sense of the normal levels. It's important to note that my statistics omit my day off each week - as such I dodge what I was told were particularly heavy days like the 17th. Some common knowledge stands out in the daily graphs: Monday and Tuesday are the lightest days in mail and packet volumes, weight, and walk duration. The numbers generally climb through Wednesday to Friday. Saturday is variable, but tends toward average like a decent Wednesday.

In illustrating the exceptionalism of December, I've taken weekly averages to eliminate the random Black Swans that sometimes ruin a good week. I should also draw attention to the catastrophe that was Week 2 of December - deliveries were cancelled on Monday 6th and partial deliveries ran from the 7th to 9th. The 10th and 11th I don't ever want to experience again. Hopefully this is averaged out, but there is no way it was lighter than the previous week...


The most obvious in the above is the dramatic upsurge in packets during Week 3 DEC, mainly due to Amazon switching their output to Swansea because of the snow. Because of the public holidays interrupting the network flow, packets drop off in Week 5 DEC before the backlog begins moving again after the New Year. Mail bundles - that is, how many letters I can hold in my hand and band together - clearly climb during December and fall back down to normal levels.

The same is true of the average weight, with a dip in the last week of December. January doesn't ease up as Summer holiday catalogues and magazines are all let loose once the cards disappear, which greatly increases the weight in each bag. So how long does it take to ram all those items through residents' tiny little postcard-only letterboxes?



In our office the walks are supposed to be three and a half hours long (effectively three for part-timers), with the general rule that no walk has grown beyond four hours (though two walks were tested at five and six hours long). The length of a walk is mostly subject to your own speed. I regularly do mine in three hours, though my day-off cover says it's longer than three and a half - I'm just faster than him. The 8th of November to December 5th averages 180 minutes until Week 2 DEC breaks the gradually increasing trend. After the snow melts it rockets up to 240 minutes.

Extended Delivery is essentially how long I'm over the last-letter-time (when I should drop the last letter through the last door), ie overtime. Notice that it too rockets up to an average of two and a half hours a day. During Christmas week I twice started at 1230. As my finish time was 1300, all but my first bag was being delivered in overtime. I claimed a total of thirteen hours extended delivery that week. Plus scheduled attendance and tips, I've come out the other side loaded.

In conclusion, volumes are greater at Christmas, as if that needed investigation. But the memories will last - two Saturdays out till 1500, four o'clock finishes all round, and a quarter to five finish on the 23rd. I really need to get back to my old walk.

Earlier this week I saw this report. Having served many pensioners and sheltered-housing complexes I actually recognise many of the pictured letters. Let me recount an anecdote from my old walk Hallmark Fount: I explained above that a bundle is how many letters I can hold in one hand. An old woman on that walk receives her own private bundle which far outnumbers the letters the rest of the apartment block combined receive - and that was every day. A few of these scam letters have actually tricked my into thinking they were genuine International Recorded items as a lot of them (I'm looking at you Readers' Digest) have peel-off barcodes in an attempt to look legitimate. I'm surprised it's taken this long to do something about them. Maybe with that out of the way we can get Virgin Media, Sky, BT, and the power companies to update their customer databases. I'm sick of sending the same letters back every week.

Five months of walk statistics here.

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