The Austin Empire

I recently bid to a new route and on my first day I got to experience cheat sheets for the first time.  These things are the best way for someone who's never cased a route before to find addresses quickly.  Whoever came up with the idea for these things is a genius!   In case you've never had the pleasure, I'll explain them for you.   On each row there are tags that list each street found on that row, in the order you would find them.  For example, If I'm looking for Secret Canyon and it's on the very last case, last row, you only have to  look down the left edge of my case to see where Secret Canyon shows up on the cheat sheets.  It happens that Secret Canyon is the very last street on my route, so the only place it shows up is the last part or the 2nd to last row and last row in the case.   That way, when you don't know the route it makes casing easier because you can quickly rule out the rows that don't include the street you're looking f...

I decided to create a place where rural carriers can come and share ideas for our incoming subs to help them learn the job and gain the confidence needed to get through the toughest parts of being a substitute carrier.  They teach the basics in training, but it's a lot of information in a very short amount of time, which makes it hard to catch everything.  Plus, the best way to learn is by actually working the routes, but it's overwhelming at the beginning and a lot of people get frustrated by the lack of training. There's so much to learn- how do you know which information is the most important to remember?  Which stuff do you put at the top of the list?  Management wants accuracy, but you also have to be able to get the route done.  How do you do both?  It takes quite awhile for most people to feel like they "get it".  When I was new (new- meaning in the first 3 years, lol) I used to have dreams about casing the mail at home and trying to get i...