
Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses - prostoalex
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0&pagewanted=all
======
js2
The USPS is really amazing. I enlisted its help for my sister's thirtieth
birthday. Let me explain.

I used Zazzle to custom print 30 postcards, each with a picture I found on the
Internet from one of 30 towns spread throughout the US, each in its own US
state. On the letter side was printed a single large letter. Once my sister
received all 30 cards they would spell out a Happy Birthday message to her. I
also hand wrote a tidbit about each town. The cards were all addressed to my
sister in FL. I stamped each card with a stamp of the state it was from, using
one of the USPS's 50 state stamp collections. (The collection I used was from
many years ago, but I found a sheet on eBay.)

Now the fun part. I wanted each postcard to be hand canceled from the town it
was supposed to be from. I also wanted the postcard to show up at my sister's
in pristine condition. So I placed each postcard into an envelope addressed to
the postmaster in that town. The envelope included a second mailing envelope
addressed to my sister and with postage, and a letter to the postmaster asking
them to hand cancel the card, then mail it on to my sister in the second
envelope.

Then I dropped all thirty envelopes in the mail in NC. I had no idea if this
would work, but after about 3 weeks my sister received them all. The envelope
which traveled the farthest was round-tripped through Barrow, AK. I also sent
her cards via HI and ME.

Some of the cards went through towns so small that the last name of the
postmaster hasn't changed in that town for generations (the USPS website lets
you look up current and former postmasters).

This was a super fun project. I got to learn a tidbit here or there about all
these small towns researching where I wanted to send them from and writing the
postcards. I also learned some people collect postmarks. And that you can
roundtrip postcards through the South Pole (it takes about a year).

Edit: here's what the cards looked like after she received them -
<http://imgur.com/f1MidVF>

~~~
edw519
Very cool. You must be a great brother.

------
fsckin
Russians have us beat -- they decoded an address with the wrong character
encoding hand written on this package.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koverto-kun-
krakozjab...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koverto-kun-
krakozjabroj.png)

~~~
ivan78
I immediately remembered about this story too. This is pretty hilarious:

"Containing a Harry Potter book, the letter was sent to a Russian student by
her French friend, who manually transcribed the address that he had received
by e-mail. The Frenchman's e-mail program was not set up correctly, so the
Cyrillic characters encoded as KOI8-R were instead displayed as diacritic
symbols from the Western character set (ISO-8859-1). Russian postal employees
deciphered the address and delivered the package successfully."

------
Theodores
During the run up to this Easter I sent my mother a varying amount of toy
Easter chicks through the post, as if they were on a migration. There were 165
in total and I deliberately wrote all of the addresses differently to see if
they would get through or not. I also got friends and colleagues to write the
address so that handwriting was far from consistent. Postcode was definitely
optional and to annoy my mother I added the address of the nearby council
estate to the address.

All but one of them made 'the migration' in a timely fashion. However, a
fortnight later my mum had a 'collect from the sorting office' note from the
postman (or post service officer, in these PC times). This was for the last
chick. By some accident this particular chick was standing up rather than
lying down in the envelope making the package too large for 1st class mail.
She had to pay ~£6 for the safe arrival of the last (165th) chick.

Incidentally they were all named and I emailed my father who could be expected
on a given day. The first letters of their names obviously made up a 'happy
easter' letter slightly longer than a 'tweet'.

This little experiment in novelty gift giving was dependent on those employed
to manually sort the mail and their sharp brains. Yep, I deliberately gave
them the run around! But it was all worth it. I for one will be sad when such
prank-art-projects-via-post are no longer possible because the machines will
have fully taken over.

~~~
justincormack
SQL injections on addresses instead? Forwarding loops?

~~~
new299
I guess what you need is too find two sorting machines, with either different
OCR or differently calibrated cameras. Then write two addresses, one of which
each machine can read, neither of which exists (or perhaps a 3rd that
exists?).

Then watch the letter keep getting returned to the sorting office and loop the
loop.

------
ultimoo
Very nice, I liked the information on how post is sorted. I also feel a little
sad for the postal workers who are about to lose their jobs.

As an aside -- Not too far from where I hail from, in rural India, the postman
not only delivers the letter to the recipient but also opens it and reads it
out to them incase they're illiterate and cannot read.

~~~
SilasX
Wouldn't it be a LOT cheaper in the long run just to teach them to read?

~~~
sliverstorm
Who says they aren't offering programs to learn to read? Even if you went on a
literacy campaign and made it a crime to be unable to read & write, you'd
still have a transitional period, in which case services exactly like this one
would be valuable.

~~~
SilasX
Yes, but that transitional period would be short enough that people wouldn't
report (as the OP did) there being a persistent, indefinitely continuing
practice of mailmen reading out mail to rural villagers.

------
dazbradbury
This brings to mind a few stories I've seen in the UK about letters being
delivered without a proper address.

This one just had a map:

[http://digitaljournal.com/article/84849#tab=comments&sc=...](http://digitaljournal.com/article/84849#tab=comments&sc=0)

And this one got delivered with minimal information also:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/How-Royal-
Ma...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/How-Royal-Mails-
detective-skills-delivered-letter-vague-address.html)

~~~
claudius
What I find more surprising about the UK is that thanks to the many post codes
(and hence just a couple houses per post code), something like

    
    
      13
      AB1 CD2
    

is an absolutely unique address.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Yes. Here a lot of websites just ask for house number and post code and then
look up the full address in the PostCode Address File.

~~~
claudius
The trade-off, of course, is that one needs to know the exact postcode of an
address. Back in Germany, most (small) towns only have exactly one postcode (5
numbers), and even in larger towns, one postcode often covers about
10000-20000 people, so it is relatively easy to remember the postcode for a
large geographical area.

But I guess this doesn’t matter all that much since you can look up addresses
online nowadays and remembering numbers seems to be as antique as the job done
by the people in the OP.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
There is no trade-off: In the UK, postcodes are much more specific, and
there's always manual address entry.

~~~
claudius
Unless ‘manual address entry’ implies that the postcode is not a necessary
part of an address, then there is the trade-off that postcodes in the UK are
(basically) recipient-specific, whereas postcodes in Germany are town-
specific. If I know my parents’ postcode, I know the postcode of someone
living three streets away from them and hence only have to remember the street
name and house number, whereas I need to remember the postcode _of_ _that_
_particular_ _recipient_ to address a letter in the UK.

However, as I said, such data being easily available nowadays renders this
point somewhat moot.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I don't understand. Why are you mentioning the trade-offs of doing this in
Germany when I'm talking about the UK?

Even so, postcodes in the UK aren't town-specific, they're more like street-
specific, roughly.

~~~
claudius
I am comparing very specific postcodes (as in the UK) to very broad postcodes
(as in Germany). While the former allow for very simple addresses (street
number + post code), they come with the trade-off I mentioned.

------
anonymouz
> Ms. Archuletta said that over the years she had seen her share of impossible
> letters, like the one addressed to the house “down the street from the
> drugstore on the corner” or one intended for “the place next to the red
> barn.”

Interestingly enough, while this centralized system is completely useless for
such "addresses", the local postman would probably have little trouble
figuring them out (especially if there is also a name on them).

~~~
bockris
My father is a rural mail carrier and can/has delivered letters addressed to

Grandma SmallTown, State, Zip

based on the return address. He has also seen his share of the 'white house
south of the bank' addresses.

They now have real street addresses (I think for the county wide 911 system)
but when I was younger our neighbor would use a multitude of vanity address.
e.g.

Jane Smith 1 Dusty Lane Smalltown, State, Zip

or 123 Tumbleweed Rd or 555 Cow Pasture etc etc

UPS trucks usually knew where to deliver it based on the name or they would
ask someone at the gas station where the person lived.

------
sp332
My favorite: the address was just

    
    
      HILL
      JOHN
      MASS
    

The correct decoding: John Underhill, Andover, Massachusetts.

------
nsns
Thanks to the ubiquity of Captchas, we all perform such tasks these days.

------
pbw
This idea of a human-in-the-loop whose role diminishes over time will recur
with many AI related technologies. Imagine call centers today with automated
attendants backed by fleets of humans to handle all the special cases and
frustrated callers. This duo will remain in place, but the humans will dwindle
over time, handling increasingly obscure accents and odd situations, as the AI
gains capability. Until there is only one lonely human... waiting for the
phone to ring. Power is handed over not with a bang.

~~~
ivanca
It will happen with programmers too (at least to some degree); first with
high-level abstractions and then slowly approaching low level.

------
WalterBright
Apparently very little of this technology has made its way into the OCR
software on my scanner!

------
jboggan
Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that her name is Melissa?

For non-geocoding-geeks: <http://www.melissadata.com/geocoding/index.htm>

------
malandrew
I wonder if all this data is searchable by the NSA/CIA. I reckon it would
produce a map like this for personal mail:
[http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-
to-s...](http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-
the-us.html)

I'm curious how the map would look for commercial mail (catalogs/bills) and
packages

~~~
ams6110
Commercial bulk mail is delivered to the post office pre-sorted by
carrier/route. By doing this, the senders get discounted postage.

------
nthitz
> Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical
> character recognition

I found it surprising that they are the leader, but they certainly have a vast
amount of varied test data so makes sense I guess!

~~~
lostlogin
Ever tried to read a handwritten radiology request form. I challenge them to a
duel.

------
AlexeiSadeski
Why are there no photos of poorly written addresses in that article?

------
Muzza
I used to do this when I worked for the post office (not in the US) and it was
by far the dullest thing I have ever done. Truly loathsome work. It was
referred to as "coding".

There were rules in place so you could only do it for 20 minutes at a stretch
and only a couple of times (three?) per shift. Presumably this had to do with
the fact that the quality - which was a problem - would collapse otherwise.
You needed to keep a low average time per letter or you would get booted off
coding duties. I can't remember exactly how long, but you needed to be able to
code a letter in a matter of seconds.

The American setup looks a lot more hardcore (six screens?!) than the one I
used though. Pretty sure the application was written in Visual Basic.

The machines which sort mail are pretty bad-ass. Not only can they sort by
postcode, but also by address so the mail comes out in the order in which the
mailman visits each building on his route.

~~~
meric
"The machines which sort mail are pretty bad-ass. Not only can they sort by
postcode, but also by address so the mail comes out in the order in which the
mailman visits each building on his route."

Now, _that_ , is technology.

~~~
gcheong
And still I get my neighbor's mail.

~~~
gngeal
That's because programmers still write code with off-by-one errors!

~~~
Retric
Thanks for that. Mostly I look at HN jokes as a waste of space, but that was
just perfect.

