How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting

At the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, keyers process 1.2 billion images of mail every year. It's a more difficult job than I thought.

(you can find contact details and social links there too)

[TomScottGo]

That 1.2 billion images stat seemed unbelievable, but it makes sense when you break down the numbers: it works out to an average of 38 images per second, which is about right for the number of staff there!

[TheBushdoctor]

About 40 years ago, I wanted to send a letter to a girl in America because she appeared in our Dutch newspaper for having saved a swan that was shot with an arrow.
All I had was her first name, the name of her town and the picture from the newspaper, being an optimistic kid, I just glued the photo on the envelope, added her name and town, and to my amazement the letter got delivered: A few weeks later I received a thank-you note in return.
Kudos to the US postal service.

[tylerdean]

Imagine doing a Captcha every 4 seconds for a living. Mad respect, I would go crazy.

[maxwhite]

I like how from an outside perspective this seems like the less advanced side of mail management when 99% of it is done with literal walls of computers, but from an internal view the humans here are the most advanced handwriting interpreting systems available that the computers have to fall back on.

[BW-]

It makes sense now. Eliminating cursive writing from schools was just part of the U.S. Postal Service’s business strategy.

[lthomsenrig]

I can't believe that every time a doctor writes a letter it goes through this processing facility. Fascinating!

[chrayez]

Only slightly-irrelevant, but I’m continually amused by the oft-repeated observation that the American “Post Office” delivers the mail, while the British “Royal Mail” delivers the post.

[farrahupson]

Oh, wow. I worked at the Salt Lake REC for several years. Whenever this place comes up in the news, it's described as the place where bad handwriting is deciphered. But in my time there, I spent more time looking at printed addresses that for some reason couldn't be read by the automated systems than looking at handwritten addresses. Also, once you learn the rules, applying them becomes automatic and extremely fast. It's a fun job for the right person.

[tunafeesh]

I love that this guy genuinely likes his job. He seems very happy to tell everyone how it works. So refreshing!

[IAmGrum]

This is a rare job that is both of these things:

1. It gets harder every day.
2. It becomes less necessary every day.

[JustMe-ksqc]

Top tip from an ex-postie in the UK: Don't use red envelopes, but if you do, always write the address on a white sticker or label and attach that. The lasers that read the address can't pick up the writing so well with a red background. They have a similar problem with metallic envelopes, so the sticker rule applies here, too. If they can't be read by machine, they have to be hand sorted, and this potentially adds days to the delivery time. We would get lorry loads at Christmas and Valentine's, and we were just an average sized town.
Also, always put a return address, even if it is just your house number and postcode. That simple act could save your item from being permanently lost if the delivery address is damaged/defaced/missing.

[PocketBeemRocket]

I once carried mail in the rain, and pocketed a letter from a customer. The rain made it into my jacket during a hard pour and when I unloaded it at the station, I saw it was smudged. I asked the supervisor what I should do and he said “It still has a return address, let Salt Lake have a go at it”. I heard back that the customer got it through. The REC is amazing.

[raydunakin]

I can't even imagine how it's possible to do this job as quickly and accurately as required, but I'm sure glad there are people who can do it.

[thstreet]

I did this as a temp job for the Christmas season like 15 years ago. For an anti-social computer nerd it was almost a dream job, pop on some headphones and just mash buttons for 8 hours. At the time the money wasn't bad either, somewhere in the $14/hour range as a transitional employee (temp). I got offered a full time spot a couple months after the season ended but turned it down, which ended up being a good move as they closed the facility just before the next holiday season.

As mind numbing as it looks, eventually your brain just keys in on the specific spots you need to check and you button mash your way through it in a blur. The days actually flew by most of the time.

[The]

As a USPS Automation Clerk and On The Job Instructor who regularly runs and assists DIOSS and AFCS machines, it's amazing to finally see what the REC site is like. They do fantastic work to get rejected mail turned around back into readable, barcoded mail in only a few hours.

[Neko-yelc]

I work here and the speed is actually easier than you think. Those examples were so legible! My favorite is cursive and backwards letters/numbers on top of bad hand writing. Now that’s hard. XD

[demonlordd]

Would've been cool if you included a "master" doing it to see how fast they do it

[CosmoDrazi]

I used to work there. As soon as newbies get out of probation, they're allowed to listen to music/podcasts on personal headphones so it's not as mind-numbing as people assume. After enough experience it became easy to enter a state of flow and breeze through a workday while I jammed out to my custom playlist. One image every four seconds on average was more than achievable when most images only need five keystrokes to process.

The down-side is that they were perpetually understaffed to the point that mandatory 12-hour shifts three or four days per week became the norm every week for two and a half years. Turnover rates were exceptionally high.

The HR department didn't expect anyone to have a life outside of work and treated everyone like interchangeable and disposable cogs in the machine. The only time off I was allowed to take was to attend funerals. Any attempts to get my schedule changed were met with deflection, diversion, and denial. I'd probably still be there working (mostly) happily if HR hadn't attempted to transfer me to graveyard shift in a different facility despite my recorded disapproval.

Don't get me wrong; The pay was good and I found the work enjoyable for my personality type. However, the bureaucratic upper management was a nightmare. As the old saying goes, "you don't quit jobs; you quit bosses."

[jameswon]

Wow! My mind is blown that there is still one left. I retired in 2000 as a technician babysitting this system at Chula Vista, CA on graveyard shift. We were shutdown in phase two as handwriting recognition software improved. When I was working, 300 operators were idle. Best job I ever had in the USPS.

[thedoublek]

I am an archivist and therefore, reading handwriting is one the key skills required for the job. However, I bow down in awe in regards to the speed at which those people are parsing the adresses. I could never achieve that. I am happy to have the luxury of taking as much time as I need for a proper transcription.

Also, I should point out that I work in Germany and the old German cursive is both a joy to read and an infuriating experience at some times. Trying to transcribe stuff from the 19th century is still easier than medieval writing by many orders of magnitude.