For most of us, there is hardly any need to send letters via the post office. Nowadays, almost everything is done online. We can pay our bills online, we communicate via our phones, and ordering things via a catalog in the mail is an experience that us millennials will one day recount to our grandkids.
Still, it’s nice to send a birthday card or a postcard every once in a while. But what happens if our handwriting happens to be a bit messy? How will the people at the post office know who to send it to?
If you’ve ever wondered what happens when the post office receives a piece of mail with illegible handwriting, here is your chance to finally get some answers. Tom Scott ended up getting to the bottom of this after visiting the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, Utah in order to find out how the post office deals with unreadable handwriting.
As it turns out, the process is rather fascinating, as Scott explained, “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. 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!”
This is already rather fascinating as I personally had no idea there was even a center dedicated to sorting illegible mail. At the center, Scott met with manager Ryan Bullock, who shared that the center was opened back in 1994 and is actually the last of its center type to exist within the United States Postal Service.
Besides the intriguing history lesson, Scott also got a look into how the center uses technology to figure out the illegible scribblings of some people.
Bullock shared, “We’re in the last Remote Encoding Center in the United States. Back in 1997, when we had 55 RECs open, all of those RECs combined keyed 19 billion images. The OCR technology is so good that, in 2021, as the last REC remaining, we only keyed 1.2 billion images. Right now, we have about 810 employees here. Shortly, we’re going to be teaching Tom how to process some of this mail.”
While it might seem straightforward and easy, the task turned out to be more complicated than it looks, as Scott found out when he said, “It’s much tougher than I thought it was going to be to keep everything in your head, and this is easy handwriting. Nothing here has been blurred.”
Watch the video down below:
Did you know this about the post office? Do you have messy handwriting? Let us know!