A New Jersey mail carrier who is a longtime welcome presence in her neighborhood where she works, recently won an award for her 30-year streak of safe driving.
SPRING LAKE HEIGHTS, N.J. (AP) — The season formerly known as spring may be on sabbatical, but for Jeanne McAlary and her neighbors, spotting Robin O’Neill, their longtime and much beloved mail carrier, darting around outside their homes is a harbinger of warmth.
“She is really a ray of sunshine. Every day, even in the bad weather, she always has something nice to say,” says McAlary. “It’s a very comforting thing to see Robin.”
O’Neill, 56, of Brick, has worked for U.S. Postal Service for 30 years, and for half of that time she’s driven and walked the same 10-mile route, which wends through neighborhoods dotted with Cape Cods and colonials between Wall and Allaire roads, west of Route 71.
These days it’s not so easy thing for mail carriers to chitchat, not with piles of Amazon packages stacked atop their usual loads and electronic sensors installed in select mailboxes along their routes tracking their progress.
The honor puts O’Neill in select company. Just 10,000 or so of the postal service’s more than 300,000 carriers and truck drivers have been recognized for driving 30 years or a million miles accident-free since the award program started in 2005.
As a winner, O’Neill gets enough of a bonus to take her husband Michael out to dinner at a nice restaurant, if she wants. Plus, a banner bearing her name and accomplishment will hang in the mail room of the Spring Lake Heights Post Office beside those of two other recent winners, Paul Viggiano of Point Pleasant and Donald Sullivan of Brick.
No one is happier for O’Neill than the 581 customers along her route.
Let’s just call it one BILLION!! No wait. ONE TRILLION MILES!!!