How to Know if Your Letter Is Read
Last of a Brood: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses
SALT LAKE City — Inside a apparently warehouselike role building filled with rows of cubicles, Melissa Stark stares at the image of an envelope on a computer screen. The handwriting is barely legible and appears to exist addressed to someone in the "cty of Jesey."
"Is that a 7 or a 9 in the address?" Ms. Stark said to no i in detail. Then she typed in a few numbers and a listing of possible addresses popped upwards on her screen. "Looks like a ix," she said before selecting an address, apparently in Bailiwick of jersey Metropolis. The letter disappears and some other ane appears on the screen.
"That means I got it right," Ms. Stark said.
Ms. Stark is i of the Postal Service'due south data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses, and she is i of the last of a brood. In September, the post office will close one of its 2 remaining centers where workers effort to read the scribble on envelopes and accost labels that machines cannot. At i time, there were 55 plants around the country where addresses rejected by machines were guessed at by workers aided with special software to get the postal service where information technology was intended.
But improved scanning technology now allows machines to "read" about all of the 160 billion pieces of mail that moved through the system terminal year. As machines have improved, workers have been let get, and afterward September, the facility here will be the post office'due south only centre for reading illegible mail.
"Nosotros empathize that these remote encoding centers were planned as a temporary gear up," said Barbara Batin, the center'southward operations manager, using the facilities' formal name. "They were created and deployed with the cognition that new technology would eventually put us out of work."
But for at present, this eye operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. More than 700 workers stare at images of messages, packages, change-of-address cards and other mail, trying to figure out where they are supposed to go. Information technology is not easy work. With software, a knowledge of geography and more than a picayune intuition, an operator has exactly 90 seconds to move each piece of mail service.
When mail service-sorting machines around the country meet addresses they cannot read, an electronic epitome of the bad handwriting or faded address is transmitted to operators here who view them and try to make full in the missing information by typing in a letter of the alphabet or a number. In one case corrected, the information is returned to the processing institute where the post is sent on to a local mail service office, ultimately ending upwards where it is supposed to get.
"Nosotros become the worst of the worst," Ms. Batin said. "It used to be that we'd become letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren't good plenty to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you lot can imagine. Still, information technology'southward our job to make sure information technology gets to where information technology's supposed to get."
Over the years, the Mail has get the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all manus-addressed postal service and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces.
That was non ever the case. In the beginning, people sorted mail. As the volume and variety increased, the postal service office turned to automation. But the machines could read only near 35 percent of the post at showtime and had problem with handwritten addresses. So the Postal Service prepare up the centers, using people to supplement the scanners. At the height of the programme, in 1997, the centers processed 19 billion images annually, near 10 percentage of all mail at the time, the mail office said.
In the terminal year, this center, and the ane in Wichita, Kan., that will close in September, deciphered just 2.4 billion images, or a mere 1.v percent of the postal service, the post office said.
Speed is important. Each worker in this nearly football-field-length room is expected to process near 1,200 images an hour, and they average three seconds an prototype.
"Not everyone tin process all the types of mail service that we get," said Ruth Burns, a grouping leader who sits in the centre of the sprawling room watching a bank of computer screens. "Some people are better at reading handwriting. Some are better at reading faded addresses. It varies."
Rita Archuletta, who has worked at the middle for 16 years, said she worked only on addresses involving letters, magazines and items listed equally "undeliverable as addressed." She does not do big envelopes, for example.
"My supervisor said my speed was too tiresome on those," she said.
Ms. Archuletta said that over the years she had seen her share of impossible letters, similar the ane addressed to the house "down the street from the drugstore on the corner" or one intended for "the place next to the red barn." Still, she said bad handwriting was the worst. "And near of the bad scribble seems to be coming from people back Due east," she said with a smile. "They really can't write."
Natalie Jenkins, who started at the facility a year afterwards information technology opened in 1994, said that while bad penmanship was a problem, addresses in unlike languages gave her the most problem.
"We get a lot of mail from San Juan, and information technology'southward in Spanish," she said. "The machines can't read it, so we take to. It does get easier after you've been doing it for a while. You offset to recognize certain things."
The saddest letter Ms. Jenkins has seen was addressed to God, plain written by a little girl whose male parent had just died. "It broke my middle," she said.
The best letters, Ms. Jenkins said, are those addressed to Santa Claus. They come in without an address and are sent to a processing center in Alaska, where volunteers answer them.
Dorsum at Ms. Stark'due south workstation, the epitome of an extremely faded letter of the alphabet with no discernible address appeared on the screen.
She zooms in. "Is that a Cipher code in the corner?" she asked, staring at the image for a few seconds.
Finally, she hit the reject button. The letter will be placed in a bin back at the post processing found where someone else will try to effigy out the address by physically examining it.
"In that location are some things fifty-fifty nosotros can't read," Ms. Stark said equally another image popped up.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html
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