Have Bad Handwriting The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back⁠↗

If the computer can’t read the address because of water damage or your grandmother’s ornate script, it sends a picture of the address to a computer at the Remote Encoding Center. For employees of the center, that means looking at thousands of addresses every day. Even the slowest (and usually the newest) “data conversion operators” can identify about 750 addresses per hour, whereas more experienced employees generally average about 1,600 per hour. “We have to walk a fine line of focusing on accuracy and not speed,” Heath says. That doesn’t mean they don’t have employees who are lightning fast; the center’s quickest employee can decipher 1,869 images per hour. New hires must go through a 55-hour training test that Heath likens to a “Star Trek” exam. “The training that a new employee gets, it’s very intense,” she adds. “It makes them fail over and over again. It feels impassable.” These operators don’t guess. The training gives them the expertise to accurately type in addresses that are then checked against the USPS database. Most of the time, there’s a match. When they don’t succeed–the water damage is too severe, the text too illegible or the information too incomplete—the mail goes to the department’s “dead letter” office, officially called the Mail Recovery Center. This is the postal service’s last resort, where employees make one final effort to find addresses by opening mail and examining its contents for clues.