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Each day, we walk to the mailbox, pluck out the mail, sort the junk mail from the bills and letters and toss it on the desk. How much thought do you give to how that mail reaches your mailbox so reliably every day but Sunday? Not much, I'll bet. You may see your postman now and then or even sometimes stop to chat. You might think they have a cushy job with great - and short - hours. However, San Diego's mail carriers deserve a salute from us all. There's a lot more to this job than meets the eye.

Carrier mail in San Diego starts their day at the crack of dawn down at the post office. The environment is somewhat dusty, due to the stacks of newspaper fillers, magazines, junk mail and regular mail piled high around their cubicle, waiting to be sorted. The cubicle consists of one cubbyhole per mail patron address. The only sorting done for them is by what belongs to their route. Each carrier's route may consist of hundreds of homes, apartment houses and businesses. They have to work fast in order to be ready to hit the streets with their sorted bundles to make their delivery to your home in a timely manner. There's lots of bending and reaching involved. Most mail carriers have a week's worth of exercise completed by the time they load their car or cart.

City mail carriers walk miles every day, rain or shine. How would your feet feel at the end of the day? Apartment dwellers may come and go on a regular basis and the Encinitas' private mail carriers must juggle all the return-to-sender pieces, outgoing mail you leave for them as well as getting your mail into your box. Private homes may have lurking dogs who love nothing better than to wait for the mail carrier and give him or her a good scare. Yikes, this begins to sound like a job you might not want. How about tripping over a tricycle in the walkway because you were readying the next house's bundle as you approached this home's mailbox?

Then there's always the hidden mailbox, where a new carrier has to search all over to find it because the home owner thinks it's cute to make it unobtrusive, buried in a hedge next to the door. Besides all these daily travails, the mail carrier bag in Encinitas is not paid to dally. They are expected to complete their route in a certain amount of time. If it takes too long to get back to the post office, the mail supervisor will certainly take note. So next time you think your mail carrier is taking breaks at the coffee shop, think again. Better yet, when Christmas rolls around, leave something nice in your mailbox for that reliable postal worker. Oh, my aching feet!