Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses | Hacker News Reader

Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses

nytimes.com

137 pointsprostoalex56 comments

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

Very cool. You must be a great brother.

Nice! Hope you thought to send a picture of the finished collection to the postmasters. Maybe on a postcard? :-)

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...

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."

Either that, or they've spent so much time on the pre-Unicode Internet that they can sight-read Cyrillic characters encoded as Latin-1...

Maybe the Russian postal service has a good crypto team as a remnant of the soviet era.

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.

SQL injections on addresses instead? Forwarding loops?

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.

I guess that little bobby tables has to receive mail, from time to time.

http://jeffkemponoracle.com/2010/03/23/sql-injection-license...

(Can't find the original source. This is one link of many.)

> prank-art-projects-via-post are no longer possible because the machines will have fully taken over.

I'm not convinced that'll be the case - there are only so many heuristics one can plan with ahead of time. At the very least I'd hope they're not tempted to go for full automation at the cost of that very small minority of letters - that indulgence is possible precisely because postal services are public operations.

I hope you made exorbitant purchases at a retail postal shop to compensate for your extreme abuse of the system.

This was actually quite shocking. I clearly had not been to a Post Office in years. Needing variety in envelopes, 'Jiffy' bags and stamps I did try and get the stationary from the Post Office. But it cost an absolute fortune.

I thought envelopes cost mere pennies, a fraction of the price of a stamp. But no, at the Post Office they cost more than the stamps.

It was also costlier in time than I thought it would be, lunchtimes weren't grab-a-sandwich-and-sit-at-the-desk, I would be out for half an hour or more if a full postal visit was needed.

After a while I started buying stamps elsewhere and using the stack of envelopes I purchased some time back in 2007. In this way I could avoid spending inordinate amount of time in the dingy Post Office. A lot of the stamps I bought this way were really old, pre-dating the 2012 Olympics. I got the feeling that nobody is buying stamps any more.

Not so recently the post in the UK was delivered before people set off for their working day, then it all got a bit more casual. Then before that there was a time when people could have half a dozen or more separate deliveries in a day. It won't be long before we no longer have Saturday deliveries and envelopes become a quaint speciality item, generally available 'free' with birthday cards but otherwise as hard to obtain as perforated dot-matrix printer paper.

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.

Ha! Very cool, I guess I never considered how mail would be handled in a country with low literacy rates. I guess I figured you would just find your literate relative :-)

I wonder if they sing it for a fee, too...

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

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them think.

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.

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.

Only if they get a LOT of mail.

Do they still have the typewriter booths in local markets to write letters for people? Has that gone digital now with laptops/printers? Or have literacy rates got to where most people can find a relative to write a letter?

Just wondering.

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=...

And this one got delivered with minimal information also:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/How-Royal-Ma...

When I was doing mail delivery as a summer job, there always were experienced delivery pros available to help decode addresses (a win-win situation: the guys approaching retirement had less mail to deliver, so they had lighter bags, but they could only leave when all others were done sorting their mail). During the sorting job in the post office, you would find postcards in your lot that only mentioned the colloquial name of a bar, the colloquial name of a regular there and a city name. When you asked, they would immediately tell you "that's x street, number 45". They also often could give you a house number, given a surname and a street.

At first, that seemed surprising, but even after a few weeks, you start recognizing surnames and linking them to numbers. It helps that mail is not uniformly distributed over all addresses.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

My favorite: the address was just

  HILL
  JOHN
  MASS

The correct decoding: John Underhill, Andover, Massachusetts.

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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

> 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!

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

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

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.

"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.

And still I get my neighbor's mail.

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

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

That happens when one of your neighbors either got no mail that day, or had their mail held.

The mailman gives the next stack to each house in turn, and apparently didn't notice the address was off.

In my case it always happened when it wasn't my regular mailman.

If you enter your address on the USPS website, you can even look up the sequence number used:

https://www.usps.com/zip4/

After you enter an address, it's under "Mailing Industry Details", shown as "eLOT" (not sure what it stands for)

https://ribbs.usps.gov/index.cfm?page=elot

eLOT = Enhanced Line of Travel

Overhead monitors - looking at the pictures you can feel the pain in neck and shoulders.

Yes. The local bus control station has displays with two rows of three monitors showing bus positions on large maps. They have them set up so operator's eye line is about middle of the two rows. They are just looking at the red dots for buses on a large set of maps though...

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