Rain? Heat? Gloom of Night? No Problem for Robb Vermeyen

Forget about nasty weather, unfriendly dogs or the slumping economic outlook of the U.S. Postal Service. Robb Vermeyen has dealt with them all.

For almost three decades he's delivered the mail despite being soaked by the rain or baked by the heat, attacked by cantankerous canines or weighed down by worry of an uncertain future.

What Vermeyen couldn't overcome was softball.

It sent La Mesa's perpetual-motion mail carrier to the dugout.

He tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee this summer while trying to beat a throw to first base in a senior league game. After surgery in early September, he still figures he has at least another two months before he can get back to walking his routes and seeing familiar faces.

"They're telling me at Kaiser that a full recovery is six months," says Vermeyen, who  wears a brace on the knee but is already up and walking around his neighborhood. "But it's not like I'm a pro athlete and I have to do what they do."

True enough. But it would be hard to find another mail carrier who stays as active or burns as many calories as Vermeyen.

At 55 and still a slim 160 pounds on his 6-foot frame, he's an activity addict. It's not enough that he walks miles each day carrying a heavy satchel. He also starts each morning with 30 minutes on his NordicTrack machine, then bikes the half-mile to work, does his route and bikes home.

Aside from softball, he also hikes. And he's competed in Senior Olympic track meets and run road races.

 "It's how you stay young, right?" he says.

The Realities

First things first. There are no mail carriers like Cliff Clavin or Newman.

Neither of those sitcom mailmen on "Cheers" or "Seinfeld" gets a stamp of approval for anything but laughs.

Says Vermeyen, smiling: "Those aren't really good examples. They're comedies. … Not a lot of reality involved there. What kind of mail carrier would keep his job if he spent most of his time sitting in a bar [like Clavin]?"

What is a reality, Vermeyen says, is the pressure to produce, especially in these hard times when every postal employee is being asked to do more. It's the hardest part of the job. You don't came back to the office with undelivered mail.

"[The job] is probably a lot more difficult than people realize," he says. "The stresses of having to do a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time. …  And if you're not up to those standards—boy, they're on you."

On a normal day, that means getting all the mail delivered in a six-hour window, after about two hours of organizing, sorting and loading. Vermeyen works from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half-hour for lunch.

Other things to know about the job:

• It's no myth. Dogs are a concern for every mail carrier. All carry dog spray (repellant) and know how to use their heavy satchels as shields when a dog comes at them. "You can't be too careful," says Vermeyen, who has a dog of his own. "There's just something about mail carriers that dogs don't like."

• Routes are carefully planned for maximum efficiency, and mail is sorted and organized in the order it will be delivered, house by house. Carriers use a time-tested "park and loop" system in which they park their trucks at a corner and use that spot as a hub for delivering up and down streets.

• Dogs, Part II: Carriers take dog threats so seriously that orange warning cards are slipped into the sorted mail so substitute carriers can know two to three houses in advance about a house with a problem dog.

• Mondays and Tuesdays can be the heaviest days for a carrier (literally) because of regularly scheduled fliers and publications such as the PennySaver.

• Don't worry. Carriers are too busy to read your mail. "I don't pay a heck of a lot of attention, truthfully,"  Vermeyen says.  "I try not to look at it too much. It's not really my business. Sometimes you get a postcard and you think, 'Oh wow, that's interesting,' and you kind of look at the back, but you don't really want to read it, you just want to see where it's from. You don't want to invade people's privacy."

• How heavy are those satchels? Sometimes, very. But the limit is 70 pounds,  Vermeyen says. To become a carrier, candidates have to prove they can lift that much.

• "Going postal." Yes, Vermeyen and his co-workers have heard the term. He knows there have been tragic, high-profile incidents of violence by postal workers in recent years, but he thinks they have more to do with coincidence, the number of postal workers (almost 600,000) and troubled personal lives than anything specific about the job.

Walking the Walk

Becoming a mail carrier had never been Vermeyen's goal, but it became his perfect pairing.

"I love being outdoors and being able to be active," he says. "I really value being able to be on the move. I don't think I'd enjoy being at a desk or inside. … I love being outdoors and not having someone breathing down your neck when you're out there."

He received a degree in foreign languages at Chapman College in Orange—he spoke French at home because his parents were from Belgium—and after college he was hoping to do something in public service.

"It just fell into my lap," he says. The Postal Service was hiring at the time—not like today—and the pay was attractive. "It wasn't so much what I was planning to do, but it was available at the time and I was able to get the job."

The year was 1982—the same year he and his wife, Joann, moved to La Mesa—and Vermeyen was on his way. After about two years working on a mail-sorting machine in San Diego, he became a mail carrier.

Most carriers at this point in their careers have their own route. But Vermeyen has five.

Because mail is delivered six days a week and the workweek is five days, the post office offers a rotating position—the job Vermeyen prefers. His week is a combo package of  the sixth day of five different routes when the regular carrier is off.

One entails walking about 10 miles. Another route is almost all apartments and condos. The others offer a mix. All are in the vicinity of the Postal Service carrier annex office near the intersection of El Paso Street and Lake Murray Boulevard. On one of the routes, he delivers mail to his own home.

"I've never been really happy wanting to do the same thing every day," he says. "I've been doing that [the five routes] so long that it's just like my regular route anyway."

Marvin Clay, who's worked as a supervisor and mail carrier in La Mesa with Vermeyen, says he's "amazed" to see how much Vermeyen enjoys his job, even after all these years.

"He's always positive," says Clay, who noted that he and Vermeyen both were honored as star performers in their area two years ago. "He's always outgoing, nice to talk to. He goes beyond what he's supposed to do. He never has a problem with anybody."

The Future

Mail carriers have overcome sleet and snow, but will they survive e-mail?

That's the question as Vermeyen and his co-workers look to the future.

The General Accounting Office has said the business model for the Postal Service "is not viable," and that cuts must be made—to jobs, wages and Saturday delivery. It's expected the Postal Service will lose $6 billion in 2010.

While Vermeyen believes in what he does, he also knows that the volume of mail —and revenue—keeps dropping.

E-mail trumps "snail mail." People (Vermeyen included) pay their bills online. Even the Christmas season no longer produces the deluge of deliveries it once did. With a shrinking work force, routes are adjusted and more is being asked from every employee.

Something will have to give, and Vermeyen's sorry to see it.

After all, he says, the Postal Service is the only delivery service that will go to "every address in the United States."

If that stops, he says, there will be some unhappy people.