Jan Allen concentrates on the road from inside her delivery truck as she looks to navigate her way through oncoming student traffic. Weaving her way around crowds of students is just one of the many obstacles Allen must overcome in her daily route to deliver on-campus mail, which she has done successfully for the last 13 years. Troy D. Sides/Criterion

By Troy D. Sides

Do you ever wonder how your mail gets to you?
I mean, everyday we come home and expect it to be there, waiting in our mailbox. But someone has to get it there somehow.
“I’m on a dead run,” said Jan Allen, a Mesa State mail delivery woman, “from the time I get to work to the time I leave.”
In an age of e-mails and Facebook posts, most people have done a fantastic job of forgetting about the hands that handle our hard mail. For Mesa State students and faculty, those hands are the hands of Jan Allen.
“I only work five hours a day,” she said, “but they are a crazy five hours, and it’s five days a week.”
Entering her 13th year on the job delivering mail for on-campus departments, Allen is the smiling, upbeat woman driving around campus in the Jetsons-looking “minitruck” with a flatbed packed with boxes of letters and small packages.
Delivering our mail, it turns out, is no easy thing.
“I started this job in 1998, whenProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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he school had 1,700 students,” Allen said. “Now there are over 7,000 students. And they all get mail.”
Good thing, then, that you mainly deliver just administrative mail, right?
“Well,” Allen said, a sly smile creeping over her face. “There are over 700 employees on the campus and you have to remember their names and departments.”
Oh. Okay. Nevermind.
Allen delivers at least two different loads of letters and small packages per day, and makes deliveries on the Bishop campus as well. If only those were the least of Allen’s inconveniences.
“This construction,” Allen said, glancing over at the massive student center that sits right in the middle of her route, “has really thrown me off. It’s almost like an obstacle course out here.”
Allen says, though, that her biggest obstacle is people.
“I try to time my runs during classes,” she said. “That way student traffic isn’t so bad. If my timing is off, it can be just crazy out here trying to avoid people.”
Allen, though, has made an art of dodging pedestrians.
“No collisions yet! I’ve had a few close calls, but so far so good. My biggest challenge is those skateboarders, though. They kinda scare me.”
Challenges like misdirected mail and the constant moving of offices due to construction keeps Allen on her toes, yet no matter the frustration that comes her way, two things inevitably result: people get their mail, and Allen has a smile throughout it all.
“I just want people to know that I’m a good person and that I’ll get them their mail,” she said. “I love showing Christ to them by maintaining a good attitude. If I’m gone for a while and then come back, people are always like, ‘Oh, we’re so glad you’re back!’”
The old mantra, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet,” certainly applies to Allen. Even when it rains, when Allen has to run out in it to cover the mail with a tarp, her positive attitude doesn’t wane.
“We have a nice, new truck, though,” she says with a bright smile. The new truck is bigger, warmer, and better sealed than the old one. “And it has a radio,” she said, beaming.
Why she can really endure it all, though, is the people.
“The best part by far is the people I get to talk to in the departments,” she said. “I get to interact with a lot of the students, too, which is cool. They say if you ever want to know anything that’s going on with the campus, just talk to me, because I seem to know everyone.”
The “everyone” that Allen knows had better enjoy her time here, because Allen plans on retiring in two and a half years. She then plans on traveling with her husband, also retired, and moving south.
“Where it’s nice and warm. No rain or snow there.”
Or skateboarders, hopefully.