Buzz
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night will deter the postal service from delivering mail—nor will even the messiest handwriting.
Every year, the USPS delivers over 160 billion pieces of mail. An impressive 98 percent of that is quickly sorted by machines with advanced optical lenses that read the addresses. But these machines have their weakness. Last year, they couldn't read around 2.4 billion items, all due to unreadable handwriting.
If your handwriting is less than neat, don’t fret—it actually helps create jobs! According to The New York Times, more than 700 postal clerks in Salt Lake City are dedicated to deciphering the most mysterious addresses in the country. And they take their work seriously. The facility runs non-stop, 24/7, 365 days a year. Each clerk processes roughly 20 letters every minute (that’s 1200 per hour!). If a clerk takes too long to figure out the address, the letter gets passed on to someone else who can do it faster.
How it works
When a sorting machine encounters an unreadable letter, it scans it and sends a digital image to the Salt Lake plant. The image appears on a worker's screen. Using special software—and a lot of local knowledge—the clerk types in any legible letters or numbers. Through trial and error, they continue searching for clues until they find a valid address, which the system verifies. Remarkably, the average worker can solve the puzzle in just three seconds. (Not everyone manages to keep up. According to Wall Street Journal, twenty percent of new hires leave within five weeks.)
However, some letters remain unsolvable. Each year, 200 million of the most perplexing and poorly written envelopes are passed to a team of postal workers, the last of a dying breed, who still sort mail the traditional way—by hand.
If they can’t decipher the poor handwriting, the letters are dubbed “nixies.” The mail is sent to the final group of handwriting experts, the nixie clerks. If they can’t unravel the mystery behind the scrawl, no one can. The mail may end up at one of two “dead letter offices.” Any valuables are auctioned, and the rest of the mail meets its fate with the shredder.
