When you post a letter or a parcel, you usually just throw it into the postbox and let the mail fairies do the rest until it arrives at your destination. But what happens if your writing is totally illegible?
Whether it's just really bad handwriting or somehow the ink has smudged to the point where it's no longer readable, this happens more than you might think.
YouTuber Tom Scott explored behind the scenes at the US Postal Service to discover what happens when they receive letters and parcels like this, and it might just blow your mind.
In the US, illegible mail gets sent to the Remote Encoding Center (REC) in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Advert
"It's the job of the folks here to turn scrawl and blurred ink into actual addresses," Scott said in the video.
According to Ryan Bullock, manager of the REC at US Postal Service, there used to be around 55 RECs across the US. Now, he's working in the last operating one.
With advances in technology, the single REC in Utah with 810 employees keyed 1.2 billion images in 2021 alone, Bullock reported. The REC is connected to every plant in the country with over 300 processing plants, including Guam, Anchorage, Alaska and Puerto Rico.
"If the machine can't read your handwriting, one of the keyers here will type in the missing information and the information goes right back to the plant, says within automation," Bullock explained.
The process is seemingly a 'whole lot cheaper' than having people sort the mail by hand. The mail address is then linked back to a massive database to match the correct address.
"Every known, good address in America is sitting on our servers in the back," Bullock said. "If it's good, the piece just goes away and you're done. If it matches a couple of good addresses, then you'll get a list, and you'll choose out of that list which is the address you were trying for."
When Scott tried out the system himself, he learned the keying rules. Workers must type the first three letters of the city's first word, then the first letter of any second word in the city name, followed by the two-letter state abbreviation. For example, 'Salt Lake City, UT' would be keyed as 'SAL L UT.'
"We're not sleuths. We're not picking out details. You key by the rules, you type in the address information from what you can clearly see," Bullock explained.
He also mentioned how fast-paced the mail reading and sorting is.
Workers have just 90 seconds to type each address and send the information back to the sorting machine. If they take longer, the mail piece gets automatically sent to a reject bin where staff must sort it by hand.
However, with fewer people handwriting mail and better OCR technology, Bullock added that their workload keeps decreasing.
The facility maintains reliable internet connectivity through multiple backup systems.
"We have internet services for three different providers. We have three fibre-optic lines coming into the building at different points. So if at any point one gets chopped off, we can maintain service," Bullock clarified.
So what happens when neither human keyers nor machines can decipher the handwriting?
Well, the mail simply goes to the reject bin for manual handling.
"If they can't figure it out, it would either get returned to the sender and if there's no return to sender information then it will go to the Mail Recovery Center," Bullock concluded.