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ALT HL: When mail addresses are too hard to read, they get sent to this strange and fascinating facility

ALT HL: The crack team of 800 specialists that works around the clock to decipher sloppy handwriting on US mail

Our handwriting is getting worse. More and more of our writing and communications are being done digitally, and young people, in particular, are getting a lot less practice when it comes to their calligraphy. Most schools have stopped teaching cursive, for example, while spending far more time on typing skills.

And yet, we still occasionally have to hand-address our physical mail, whether it’s a holiday card, a postcard, or a package.

We don’t always make it easy on the postal service when they’re trying to decipher where our mail should go. Luckily, they have a pretty fascinating way of dealing with the problem.

The U.S. Postal Service sees an unimaginable amount of illegible addresses on mail every single day. To be fair, not all of it comes down to sloppy handwriting. Labels and packaging can get wet, smudged, ripped, torn, or otherwise damaged, and that makes it extremely difficult for mail carriers to decipher the delivery address.

You’d probably imagine that if the post office couldn’t read the delivery address, they’d just return the package to the sender. If so, you’d be wrong. Instead, they send the mail (well, at least a photo of it) to a mysterious and remote facility in Salt Lake City, Utah called the U.S Postal Service Remote Encoding Center.

According to Atlas Obscura, the facility is open 24 hours per day. Expert workers take shifts deciphering, or encoding, scanned images of illegible addresses. The best of them work through hundreds per hour, usually taking less than 10 seconds per item. The facility works through over five million pieces of mail every day.

Every. Single. Day.

– YouTube www.youtube.com

The process of encoding the mail is very cool. The electronic system the encoders—called “keyers”—use is connected to real conveyer belts full of mail all over the country.

The local mail distributors are counting on the REC to properly process the illegible mail items before they get dumped off the conveyer belt and into a bin that must be sorted by hand.

Time is of the essence! That’s why the best keyers process an address about every four seconds. Like a library, there’s no talking or extra noise allowed in the work room. It’s important that the keyers have the utmost focus at all times.

Not all of the items that come through the REC are the result of bad or damaged handwriting, by the way. Sometimes, the handwriting is highly stylized. That’s why posters displaying cursive letters are hung in every cubicle, next to coding sheets that list state abbreviations, cities, etc.

At one point, there were 55 similar sites all across the United States. But improvements in software that can automatically read addresses and the lower volume of handwritten mail and letters going out means the Salt Lake City facility is the last one standing.

The REC currently employs about 800 people, but the facility is processing less and less mail every year.

Even still, the human keyers are the last line of defense when AI, machine-learning, and fancy algorithms fail. The technology will continue to improve, but human intuition and judgment simply can’t be replaced in the toughest cases.

– YouTube www.youtube.com

What happens if the keyers at the USPSREC can’t decipher an address? All is not lost.

A local postal worker would retrieve the mail from the “reject bin” and do his or her best to figure it out upon closer, physical inspection. If that fails, the mail would likely be returned to its original sender.

However, some postal workers have been known to go above and beyond to deliver mail. One famous viral story out of Iceland shows a sender that hand-doodled a map on the outside of a letter in lieu of an address—and it worked.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of supposed “concern” about the U.S. Postal Service not being profitable and losing money each year. It is self-funded and receives no funds from American tax dollars.

Amid talks of the USPS’s “broken business model,” it’s easy to forget that mail and package delivery is an essential public service. It keys our economy, our communities, and our democracy.

The postal service is in danger of being shut down or privatized, but that would be a major disservice to the postal workers and Encoding Center keyers who work tirelessly to make sure mail gets delivered on time to the right place.