Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Scrambled Letters







Can you read this letter?
Automated mail sorting machines couldn't.
And that's where Remote Encoding Centers come into the process.

Thousands of workers operating 24 hours a day go through mail trying to decipher where the mail is supposed to go. Some handle as many of these mysteries as 8,000 a day.

The data conversion operators don't see the actual envelopes. They have an image taken by a machine that could not read it at a processing facility somewhere across the nation. They look at it onscreen where they can zoom in on images, rotate them or do whatever it takes to figure it out.

Sometimes it's just the ZIP Code that can't be read, other times the ink has smeared. But most often it's plain old bad penmanship. Advice for not having your mail end up here? Take your time writing an address.


How good is your penmanship? Click here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Experience, not computers, deciphers illegible mail ;)

Anonymous said...

I would love that job! Solving little mysteries.

Robert said...

Me too, I get so much satisfaction out of being able to decipher an illegible mailpiece and get it where it was meant to go. I do think back, neck, and eye strain would be the downside to this job, however. Hats off to the folks at the REC!