<\/p>\n
ALT HL: When mail addresses are too hard to read, they get sent to this strange and fascinating facility<\/p>\n
ALT HL: The crack team of 800 specialists that works around the clock to decipher sloppy handwriting on US mail<\/p>\n
Our handwriting is getting worse<\/a>. 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<\/a>, for example, while spending far more time on typing skills.<\/p>\n And yet, we still occasionally have to hand-address our physical mail<\/a>, whether it’s a holiday card, a postcard, or a package.<\/p>\n 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You’d probably imagine that if the post office<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n