If you didn’t get your paper yesterday, I’m sorry. Truly. I want The Bulletin’s subscribers to get their papers on time, every day, without fail, and I know that hasn’t been happening recently.

There are reasons, but no excuses, for why we here have had such trouble in the last couple of months getting papers delivered as they should be, and I’ll explain. First, I want to say one thing: Nobody feels worse about the problem than the men and women who work here and the members of my family who own the newspaper. All of us take pride in what we do, and we know we’re not doing as well as you expect us to do.

Mike Hrycko, 35, our circulation director, came to The Bulletin not quite a year ago. At the time, our delivery system was in disarray — the storms of the winter of 2016-17 left us short of route drivers and replacing them was not easy. He did so, however, and things smoothed out for a time. No newspaper in the country, by the way, has a perfect circulation system. Routes go down as drivers quit, weather and traffic slow delivery, and so on. Our problems, in other words, are a matter of degree, not something unheard of in the industry.

One thing Hrycko discovered early on is that there was neither rhyme nor reason to our 92 delivery routes. Logic tells you that they should be arranged so that drivers cover as compact an area as possible and no one driver delivers in another driver’s territory. That was far from true here, so we purchased new software to tidy things up. That meant many drivers had to learn new addresses on unfamiliar streets.

Even without the route changes, the job of a route driver isn’t particularly easy. It never was intended to equal a full-time job, and it doesn’t.

In fact, drivers, who are not Bulletin employees but independent contractors, work only about four hours a day, if that.

Moreover, they work beginning about 2 a.m., and they’re supposed to have finished by 6 a.m. on weekdays, a bit later on weekends. In other words, throwing newspapers for The Bulletin will make you a nice bit of extra money each month, but don’t expect to live on it.

But the combination of new routes and new contracts that cost some drivers income strained our system severely. Old drivers quit, and the turnover among newer drivers continues.

The job may not be rocket science, but the time constraints are real, and not everyone is as prepared for that as they think they are.

New drivers face another problem as well. They have to learn what houses on what streets get newspapers, and they have to do in the early morning hours, often in the dark.

Our new circulation software updates each route every night, but finding street names and addresses at 4 a.m. can be difficult, at best. Some drivers last a day, some longer.

Every time a driver quits, someone in this office must take up the slack. As of midday Wednesday, we had about nine routes without drivers, and those papers were being delivered by Hrycko and six managers and district managers, seven days a week, in addition to their regular duties. Hrycko himself spends much of his time after delivering papers negotiating contracts with potential route drivers.

We know it can feel as if no one hears your complaint if you email or call in and leave a message, and that’s frustrating.

At least three people spend all day, every day, taking complaints and helping solve problems over the phone. By my calculation, they can handle about 144 calls a day (six calls an hour times three customer service representatives times eight hours a day), and some days, we get well over 200 calls. You can see the problem.

The timing is different for email responses, but the difficulty is the same. While all calls and emails are listened to or read, not all get answered.

Some things do happen, however. If your carrier doesn’t deliver your paper, we make every effort to get it to you. If we’re unable to do so, your subscription is extended by a day. Too, if you’ve attached your email address to your account, you can access our website, bendbulletin.com — it comes with your paid subscription.

I would promise you all this will have been sorted out in a couple of weeks, but I can’t. I can promise you everyone involved is working hard to make that happen as quickly as possible. All of us, and again, I include my sisters and me, want you to receive the newspaper we’re proud of when you expect to get it.

— Janet Stevens is deputy editor of The Bulletin. Contact: 541-617-7821, jstevens@bendbulletin.com.