VALLEY POSTAL WORKERS GET STAMP OF APPROVAL.

Byline: Peter Hartlaub Daily News Staff Writer

Hit the bricks, Cliff Clavin. Find a job in the private sector, Newman.

The slacker postmen seen on TV would never cut it among the new generation of workers at the U.S. Postal Service, especially in the San Fernando Valley, which has the best mail service in California, officials announced Wednesday.

Through rain, snow and everything else that El Nino had to offer, Valley mail sorters and postal carriers met their appointed rounds from Dec. 6 to Feb. 27 better than anyone else in the state, officials said.

``Mail should reach its destination overnight in the Los Angeles Basin,'' Postal Service spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou said. ``If you mail something in the City of Industry, it should get to Chatsworth the next day.''

That theory was put to the test by Price Waterhouse, the same independent accounting firm that handles the Oscars.

Price Waterhouse surveyed 96 metropolitan areas in the United States, where the average success rate for first-class mail during the winter quarter was 93 percent. The Valley district's success rate was 95 percent, tied for No. 2 in the nation.

Compare that to roughly the same time period in 1992, when Bouffiou said the Valley was delivering overnight mail with an 82 percent success rate, one percent below the national average.

Bouffiou said ``attention to detail'' accounted for the rise. Bill Almaraz, area plant manager, said workers have adopted the ``every piece, every day'' philosophy of mail delivery.

``We used to be everybody's joke, but these people take a lot of pride in their work,'' said Almaraz, who oversees mail sorting and delivery in the Valley. ``We have more employees who love their job now than in the past.''

Cliff Clavin from ``Cheers'' and Newman from ``Seinfeld,'' both caricatures of clueless mail carriers, will live on in reruns. ``Going postal,'' a popular synonym for a ``violent nervous breakdown,'' may never leave the national lexicon. But Almaraz has real-life stories of postal heroics in the San Fernando Valley that put all the stereotypes to shame.

He speaks emotionally of an employee who lives in Palmdale, but recently drove in the opposite direction on his own time to make sure hundreds of letters made their destination in one day instead of two.

``On the way home he went all the way to San Fernando to deliver a tray of mail that had been left in a letter rack (in Santa Clarita),'' Almaraz said. ``That's the real post office at work.''