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Mail carrier Leon Martinez closes up his delivery truck with armloads of mail to deliver to homes in his daily route of 334 residences and 110 businesses. "I absolutely love this," Martinez said. "I enjoy walking, being outside and the customers." Martinez started his route between San Mateo Boulevard and Alvarado Drive Northeast seven years ago. "Of the 334 homes I deliver to, I probably know 325 of them," he said.

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The saying talks about rain and snow, sleet and hail.

It doesn't say anything about dogs.

"You just have to be ready for it," said Leon Martinez, a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service, on a break from his shift last week.

Fending off the occasional Fido is one challenge of being a postal worker - particularly a letter carrier, a job that's part salesman and customer service representative combined with an element of professional power walking.

Statewide, the postal service employs 1,088 city letter carriers - 600, or 55 percent, of whom are in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho. Rural carriers number 480 statewide - 192, or 40 percent, of whom are in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho.

The postal service also employs 223 retail clerks in the state, 111 of whom are in the Albuquerque area.

At least one union representing postal workers believes that's not enough.

"We still have very late mail delivery going on in the city of Albuquerque and other cities across the state," said Eugene Gabaldon, president of the American Postal Workers Union Local 380, which represents about 850 postal workers in the metro area including clerks, as well as maintenance and motor vehicle workers. "That's not acceptable and that's not good customer service."

Gabaldon said lines at postal service retail outlets are a growing problem, all despite the fact that the service has added staff and seen improved service ratings.

His quest is to convince the postal service that more carriers and clerks are needed to improve the situation.

Last week, Gabaldon began airing radio ads on KABQ-AM (1350) and KHFM-FM (95.5) in Albuquerque and on stations in cities across the state asking the public to send him stories of their mail woes. Gabaldon made a similar effort last January.

As of Friday morning, Gabaldon had received around 33 responses from customers statewide, though most came from customers in Rio Rancho, he said. They included one from an Albuquerque man who wrote that "the customer service has become so bad that I have been exploring other options for my business mail."

Local officials from the National Association of Letter Carriers, another union, couldn't be reached to see if they agree with the APWU's contention.

Postal service officials point to improved service scores and recent hiring as evidence that service is getting better.

Barbara Wood, a spokeswoman for the postal service's Albuquerque district - which includes the entire state - said 137 carriers were added for city routes in New Mexico in the fiscal year that ran from Oct. 1, 2005 through Sept. 30. Of those, 87 were in the Albuquerque and Rio Rancho area.

Also, 194 retail clerks were added to the payroll statewide, 41 of them in the metro area, she said.

During the first quarter of that same fiscal year, the Albuquerque district's service score ranked 70th in the nation.

By the end of the final quarter in September, the district was in the top 20, she said.

Wood said it may be true that some postal workers are still out delivering mail in the evening.

"But it's very few," she said. "In the past, we had several. Now we have a few people at stations where there are carriers out after dark because of sick leaves. But it's not an everyday occurrence."

The postal service isn't on any sort of hiring freeze, but workers are hired on an as-needed basis, often based on attrition, she said. Retail centers are staffed based on the number of transactions each one processes, she said.

"Right now, we're confident that we're at a good number for the volume of transactions we're doing," she said.

The hiring process for becoming a postal worker - whether a clerk or carrier - isn't as simple as putting in an application to your local post office.

Wood said the postal service issues a test only about once every five years, the most recent being administered about two years ago.

Applicants whose scores qualify them for employment are then placed on a waiting list for the next opening. The top applicant on the list would receive a call for the next available opening, regardless of whether it was for a carrier or clerk, she said.

Military applicants are exceptions. Veterans receive a five point advantage in the test; wounded vets get 10. And military personnel who have been discharged for a year can bypass the typical testing schedule and apply directly to the post office, Wood said.

Martinez, 36, is a Bloomfield, N.M., native who joined the ranks of postal workers nine years ago after leaving the Navy.

He's delivered mail in the Uptown area for more than seven years and also helps train new letter carriers.

His day starts on average at 7:30 a.m., when he begins hand-sorting the mail for his route. Machines can presort most of the letter-sized mail, work that accounts for about 80 percent of the workload, Martinez said.

Magazine-sized flat mail must be hand-sorted. And he must organize the machine-sorted mail in the order of his scheduled stops, he said.

"People don't realize we sort a lot of our mail by hand," he said, a situation that worsens during political season, because campaign fliers don't work well in the automatic sorters.

A letter carrier's route is timed. The amount of time Martinez is allotted is something he must negotiate each day with his supervisor. If his load is particularly large, he can ask for overtime.

Generally, the transition from mail truck, to delivery, back to the mail truck and on to the next stop is about 15 minutes, he said.

While letter carriers get some cushion time around their prescribed return each day, they can't afford many delays.

So if a car is parked in front of your cluster of mail boxes, the carrier is within his or her right to skip delivery that day, Martinez said.

"Every time they have to get out of the truck . . . it takes more time they're not allotted," he said.

Despite having a postal service vehicle, much of Martinez's route is delivered on foot. Of the 110 businesses and 334 residences he serves on his route, only 23 require drive-up delivery, he said.

"I know every one of my customers," he said.

He also knows their mailing habits. When those habits change - or, more specifically, when a customer could make use of a new or different delivery service - Martinez turns to salesman, directing them to other postal options.

Not everybody realizes that being a letter carrier requires so much walking, he said.

"I had one person on the second day of training tell me `I'm going to quit,' " he said. "Until you're out there doing it, you don't realize how much (walking) is involved."

Then there's the dogs.

Dog-bite incidents are more common than might be imagined. The postal service saw 47 dog bite incidents in the state during the fiscal year that ended last month, Wood said.

Martinez said it's a hazard of the job that comes mostly when having to pass through yards to deliver mail to a customer's door.

You never know how a dog will react, he said.

Because of that, postal carriers carry dog spray, though Martinez said he's used it maybe five times in his nine-year career.

"Our satchel," he said, "is our best defense."