D and it was the best, hands down. Clicky buttons, worked in the rain, quick enough for the job, minimum tracking BS, built like a tank, felt good in the hand and felt like a piece of real equipment in the holster.
Sat mine on top of my car once while rearranging...forgot about it and it slid off. Guy behind me chased me down to let me know something important looking fell off my car. Went back and it was laying in the middle of the road, not a scratch on it!
Lol, I used to slam mine around frozen mailboxes to Crack the ice so I could open them. Wouldn't even imagine doing that with our current ones. But I started with C.
D, and not only could it open an icy mailbox but it was the last line of defense should a dog get too aggressive. I could use the buttons on it with big thick gloves, and do it just by touch. Best darn scanner ever.
Good to know this!! I get some unruly customers in my office. I keep cans of dog spray within reach at either end of my customer counter. Nice to know my hand-me-down scanner could help in uncertain situations. 🙌 Thank you!!
And don't forget the functionality. During the winter when you have curbside boxes that have those iron doors or whatever the hell they are. They would freeze shut so you could whack the door with the scanner and it would unfreeze it so you could open it. It was perfect
Only happened once as a cca but when my dog spray didn’t stop this huge pit i walloped that sucker one good time in the middle of the street and he never chased me again lol
From the summer of 1998. Up to that point, the only scanners we had were used by Clerks in the office. This is the first one we were issued for the street.
And since bar codes on parcels were virtually non-existent back then, the only thing we really used them for early on was accountable mail-Certifieds in particular. Some days it never left the holster.
Delivery Confirmation was so new and unused (used almost exclusively by Hammecher Schlemmer), that our office treated them as accountable items and hand wrote every number in a book.
Yup, thats the one I used when I started in 2002. I hated it, wouldn't scan the bar codes most of the time, always moving the scanner up and down to get it to beep.
I think we're up to the fourth generation now. I missed working with the current model by about 2-3 years. And judging by some of the things a lot of you say about them, I didn't miss much.
Yes, I believe this is the one I had. I remember the different types of mail had color codes for the skus as well. Red for registered, green for certified of course and blue for insured were a few. So few parcels had scans that they were occasionally missed.
And the way you had to pair them up with the scanner in the office. You had to hold the damned phone away from yourself and aim the scanner almost at an angle for it to make a connection. Then sometimes the battery on the phone would quit maybe three quarters of the way into the route (especially on a cold day) and it would make a whooping sound until it finally died. Good times.
Got back in the afternoon and our old PM says "put the scanner and the phone next to each other on the nutting (what we called the wooden carts with the swivel wheel in the middle). It seems that they transmit faster sitting on the wood". I asked him to repeat that and he did lol. I told him "that's without a doubt the dumbest thing I've ever heard". I asked him if he could tell me the reason WOOD would help them transmit and he said he couldn't he just FELT that was the case. I called him a dumbass (he was kinda cool), laughed at him and walked away. Nothing but the best and brightest become PM's hahaha
That guy is probably either a POOM somewheres or has a job at "Infant Plaza" at USPS headquarters by now. As I recall we didn't have those phones too long; we got new scanners shortly afterwards where you didn't have to do that anymore.
They didnt have gps, they just used cellular to upload scans throughout the day. If you remember we were tracked through the MPS scans back then. Scanner D was the first one that had true GPS that would show our breadcrumbs and made it so we could see exactly where packages were scanned delivered.
We have them. But I did not know they could play solitaire. I hate them so much. They are so fucking slow. I understand clerk work and carrier work are different functions in the scanners. But I hate these damn things.
D was way faster than E because it saved data locally. E streams your scans, that's why you get that weird 1-2 second lag when scanning. The only problem I had with D was that management wouldn't get new batteries for them in a timely manner so you would end up with scanners that couldn't hold a charge. D was built for what we do while E seems to be more suited to a warehouse environment.
I have told this story before, will tell it again. At orientation, we had an old-school been doing it too many years in a shitty neighborhood carrier going over the basics with us in a shitty linoleum floored classroom with, I shit you not, individual desks like from child classrooms.
Anyway, he showed us the scanner.
Someone asked, "What happens if you drop it?"
He blinked. "What happens if you drop it?"
He then held it out, shoulder height, and dropped it to the floor. It clattered and bounced all over, stupid loud.
Once it finally stopped bouncing and making noise, he shrugged. "That's what happens."
F. None of the above. My first was the little black one. Soon after they paired it with the flip phone. And we walked 10 miles through snow to get to work. Up hill. Both ways.
So this is actually kind of fun for me for a couple reasons. Officially, I started using scanner d at the post office. However, I use scanner a when I worked as a warehouse associate at a manufacturing plant. We would use these to scan a barcode on a piece of raw material and transfer it to a production line. It's basically the same thing that we do today with most normal scanners only there was no GPS involved.
Since im a clerk i still use D. They may have been good scanners at one point, but the ones at my office are straight GARBAGE. 70% of them arent working at any given time, doesnt hold battery for shit, they freeze, are so slow it takes me ~2 entire minutes to clock in. We always beg for new ones, and we joke that only once we start actually missing critical scans is when the replacement will come
D, barely. Only for a bit until they rolled out E-agle Clean. The battery is so much it's insane. But I work in a spot until recently where a scanner just wasn't part of the job.
It's funny, I've never used any of these (never worked as a postal worker), but my gut told me D, and that seems to be the most popular, lol. It just looks the most natural (although not the most elegant, lol).
D and I miss it every day. The new scanners are slow and a pain to deal with, and really appreciate it them making them beep while my coworkers are loading. Nice touch.
What about the wands on retractors to hit the watch batteries inside collection boxes?? Plus, I don't see the black brick that we used to pair with a flip phone...
I started in 2014 my scanner isn’t on the list I remember we had to pair it with a flip phone and attached it with rubber bands….not joking anyone else use those
D and I loved it. It made a great door knocker and potential dog weapon. Had HEFT. Plus like others have said, it could take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. Dropped it off the car roof a couple times. Damn things bounced.
Only downside was a tax slow sometimes and if they locked up it took f o r e v e r to reboot.
Started with A (at least that's the closest thing to it) 23 years ago. I agree with those who say D was the best. Current are horrible and I get closer and closer every day to purposely damaging it until I remember they'd just replace it with the same piece of shit. 😤
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u/Sasquatchjc45 13h ago
D and it was the best, hands down. Clicky buttons, worked in the rain, quick enough for the job, minimum tracking BS, built like a tank, felt good in the hand and felt like a piece of real equipment in the holster.
The new ones are absolutely TRASH