The Food Drive

Every year the Post Office does a food drive.  As a carrier (At least at my office) this constitutes us one day passing out plastic bags to everyone.  (This is a lot more difficult than it seems.)  It also makes me feel all weird thinking people will be mad to find a waded up plastic bag in their mail box. Lol! Two, Passing out little flyers to remind everyone about it. Then, we get to pick everyone's donations up.

I did this last year, and it was crazy. But, I can honestly say, this year was even worse.  I was doing a different route than my regular one.  Mike (the regular carrier for the route I was doing) didn't mention that his route is one of the best donators at our office... 

A little background, my regular route has around 770 families on it.  I had lots last year when I collected.  Mike's route has only 550 something families.  He got TONS this year!  I was talking to Angie and she asked me to take some pictures of my plunder before I arrived at the first drop off point, which for me was at 1:30.  I was about 2/3's of the way through the route.  These are the pictures...

This is from my point of view in the front.  Yon can see that plastic tub with the blue stickers on it, yes..?  That tub is on top of a whole other layer of tubs underneath.  The tubs are about a foot and a half deep. 

This is from the back of the truck.  You can see the tubs a bit better here.  We counted how many tubs I had.  It was around  20-25.  It was hard to count because there was another carrier with tubs there too, and they were all set on the ground next to each other.

I can't get over how much food I was carrying around!  As my dad would say, "I was shootin' coons."  by the time I made the drop off.  Lol! This could probably sustain a family of 4 for maybe... a year. Depending on how much they eat of course. 

Some carriers get really upset with the food drive because you have to deliver the mail while you do this.  Lucky for me, I didn't have much mail that day so my mail was never buried underneath anything.  I had one the the city carriers ask me before I left if it bothered me to pick all this up.  I said, "No, is it supposed to..?"  I think of it two ways.  One, I get a day of extreme exercise, without really trying.  And two, I try to remember all the people that it will help.  Don't get me wrong, sometimes I get frustrated with it and wish I wasn't doing it, but really try to remember those two points above. 

The reason I even took the pictures was because Angie was telling me about how crappy the food drive is up there.  No fault of the people donating.  For some reason their office didn't get enough bags to pass out to everyone, so only a very few people got any.  When I talked to her, she was pretty close to done and only had about 10 bags, not even full mind you.  She wanted to see my plunder.