Rural mail evaluation forms 4241A and 4241M USPS Rural route RCA

hey how's it going um so I was reproached by somebody on this website that I go to so I've talked about this website before it's called rural mail talk and uh you know I've said before uh one of the best things about being a rural carrier is the people and there's some really great people who frequent uh that message board at uh rural mail talk and uh you can have some great discussions there and also there you know there's a lot of people who are knowledgeable so if you have questions about things like Union problems or technical things it's a great place to go and get your questions the answer that's where I go uh because yeah again there's very knowledgeable people though they're open to sharing uh with you and trying to get you the right information so great place to go anyways uh enough about that so anyways a member there uh C double dollar sign um talking about making a video about uh the 42 41A and the 42 41m and what these are are these are forms that kind of are used to evaluate your route say how long uh it should take you to pack up and deliver your route which kind of well which directly translates into how much money um you are paid for delivering that route okay so it's an important thing uh and he he sent me these forms kind of to help take the mystery out of it now I don't know a great deal about it my biggest uh my biggest uh experience with this you know I've been part of the mail survey a little bit but I'm I'm just an RCA and right now I only work usually one day a week so you know I'm not as involved with this stuff as many other people so again if you have deep questions go to rural mail talk otherwise we could have certainly have a discussion Down Below in the comments All right so get started all right so the 42 one 4241a and the 4241m let's dive in all right so this is uh the 42 41A and basically it's a summary of everything that comes off the 4241 m so you've got your office time your route time and your street time see 25 minutes for random letter is 72 minutes for random Flats now these are based on the week not not how long in the day because I was looking at this like 71 minutes to pull down that's a long time to pull down when you only have 238 boxes to deliver to it's like oh okay so this is probably uh for the week and yeah that's what it is and down here you see hours and minutes um that tells you office 10 hours in the office that week 28 minutes on the street I said 28 hours on the street uh for a total of 38 hours okay and then you can see down here that um yeah what what this person gets paid is based upon that okay uh forty two thousand that's what they're guaranteed um then down here also you see the EMA so this is probably a POV route and that's what they get uh for their daily um every day they deliver they get 80 further to cover their POV thinking okay all right 42 141 ABS so there's three pages to this here's one page uh this is a route page and you can see uh with C double dollar sign put here there's three pages it's a real nitty-gritty of the route so this shows you how long everything is supposed to take so all the little things stop signs um how many boxes there are uh how many boxes on the curb how many other okay all of this here and then they total up and then they total up the service time so this is what one page of that looks like okay again this is the route so out on the route so each one of these has three portions so these 42 41A summarizes it up in one page office timer Street volume um 4241 M has three pages one page for the route so basically one page for the driving around um okay uh one page for the office and one page for the street okay um all right and then if you look at this so each category so each category uh you to get the number on the 42 148 1A you would add up all the things on the 4241m so let me go back a little bit and you see on this page all these things are service right and you see all over here in service time you've got all these numbers to add up starting with 37 29 37.29 and all those numbers up all the way down okay and then you multiply that by the number of days for the route and that's how they get on this sheet 42 148 4241a that's how they get to 230 minutes okay they take all of these numbers add them up multiply by the number of days that the route is and that's how they get that okay um moving on so all this stuff is based on a 12 month average so you know they get data from different places they get data from the carriers themselves we have to do take part in the mail survey to get data from the clerks they have to take part in the mail survey and then also at the plant data is collected out on the street when you do your Rx scans and your package scans all that data is analyzed okay so now not data from everyday so they don't use data from every day to do this obviously but they kind of put together what they do have try to come up with how long the route is supposed to take okay um this you can see letters random letter Flats I'm thinking that this is the number of pieces not a time so you get about 43 letters okay in a day about 100 just under 100 Flats in a day guessing that's what that is because that seems about right based on the routes I've been on um but yeah they use this data and they again compile it to get you uh what you how long the Rod's supposed to take all right so then here's some more important notes so this is basically how they calculate so you saw this is from let me go back that's from this page see right here okay this row curb box okay that's where this comes from and so you take this number which is how many boxes are on the route and again that's average because you know during the year you might have 234 boxes and then it moves then first then for like you know at the beginning of the year you might only have 234 boxes but then some boxes get added so now it averages for the year to two of the 35.83 average per year I'm guessing I think that's how they get that number and this is how long it's supposed to take in each box that's what they figured out right this is just a code and then 78 so now what this is that number tells you how many boxes are usually um let's see what's that from it's called route coverage so what that is is they somehow figure out how many boxes are actually visited each day so based on this they're saying that on an average day you're skipping 12 of the boxes when you deliver okay whether or not that's true or accurate I don't know I've seen discussions of this on rural mail talk and people argue about yeah they say I'm skipping all these boxes but I'm not so not very accurate but that's what that's supposed to be okay they multiply that all together and this is how long you're supposed to spend doing this particular thing servicing those boxes okay and then stop signs same thing you just multiply across 61.83 times how long it's supposed to take each stop sign and that gives you what you're supposed to have for the route okay activity scans same thing this is how money happen each day how long it's supposed to take and that gives you the total amount of time for the day okay um I guess also wanted me to mention that additional complexity so on these forms some of these numbers are absent they don't explain how they get what they came up with they just say it's complex so it gets it's beyond it's beyond our mathematics as laypeople so they tell us oh it's complex rather than uh showing us how it's figured into our route time okay all right uh oops the column so I think we've kind of talked about this before but yeah you take the columns for the route the street the office and you add that all together and that gives you your total so back on that oops back on that first page you can see down here they've added those three things together uh off a street total they add it together and that's how long your route takes okay that's how long it is right again that's what your pay is based on so I mean really that's it so uh again these forms are what's used to evaluate your route now I'm understanding that there's a process right now to appeal these because some people's routes have been cut down immensely um the routes I carry have each been cut down about an hour so what was supposed to take uh eight and a half hours today now take seven and a half hours a day I think the other route was just over nine and now it's down to like 8.5 so every time I deliver that route I make a little bit less money so it's a big deal and again I only deliver once a day but it is a big deal to the carriers who this is their primary job and you know if you've gone from making 45 000 to 42 000 or 48 000 just making forty thousand that can really affect your family so uh pray for the carriers out there okay again if you have any questions uh reach out in the comments below but again even better uh go to Rural mailtalk.com and uh hey let me get back to this um here he is down here you see C dollar double dollar sign yeah that's the guy uh reach out to see double dollar sign on real mail talking you'll be happy to talk to you about this as well okay talk to you soon uh I hope you've learned something and hey maybe reach out to me and teach me something too all right all right have a good day