- Almost all the letters that get sent
in the United States are processed automatically. You put a letter in a post box, it's taken to the closest
processing center, where cameras and computers take a picture
of the front of the envelope, read the address with optical
character recognition, OCR, and it's then passed on to
the right truck or plane. That deals with pretty much everything,
even the handwritten letters. But what if your
handwriting is really bad? Like, really bad. Or the envelope got a bit damp,
and the ink blurred and ran? The postal service sends the
picture of the envelope here to the Remote Encoding Center, the REC,
in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it's the job of the folks here
to turn scrawl and blurred ink into actual addresses. It's a quiet day here today. Mail volumes are low in
the middle of summer. So while it's not busy inside, I'm going to see if I'd
be any good at this. - We're in the last Remote Encoding Center
in the United States. Back in 1997, when we had 55 RECs open, all of those RECs combined
keyed 19 billion images. The OCR technology is
so good that, in 2021, as the last REC remaining,
we only keyed 1.2 billion images. Right now, we have about
810 employees here. Shortly, we're going
to be teaching Tom how to process some of this mail. It'll be a lot of fun. - It's important to say that I can't
show you any actual mail, not the envelopes, not anything. If any appears in the
background on a screen, it'll be blurred out.
That's all considered strictly private. And besides, I'm not going to
flash random people's addresses on the screen of a YouTube video, particularly when they'll
usually be written in distinctive handwriting? You can probably work out
how that could go wrong. But there is a stack
of demonstration mail, envelopes and addresses used for training, and that's what I'm going to be tested on. - If you drop off a piece of mail, it makes it to the local processing plant. If the machine can't
read your handwriting, one of the keyers here will
type in the missing information, and the information goes
right back to the plant, stays within automation,
which is a whole lot cheaper than having somebody physically
sort that piece by hand. - All right, what do I need to do? - Put your last name and
first initial into that. - I looked at the keyboard
to look for the numbers and realized this is a- - That is not a standard keyboard!
- That is not a standard keyboard. Other than the QWERTY
letters and the numpad, everything is different. Okay. - To make everything faster for us, they did some weird
things with the keyboards that they've provided us. The home row, A, S, D, F, those
also work as your numbers. You can't reach up to the
top of the keyboard to hit 1, 2, 3. - "How to key the outward
portion of a mailpiece image." - We're calling outward
the city and the state. - City and the state, okay. Siemens came up with this in the '90s. So they decided "C coding"
is going to mean zip code. Outward is going to mean city and state. Inward is going to mean
the street address. - And that's now the
language that you use, because that's what they decided. - To make it faster to key these letters, our keying is a small extract
of what's on the letter, and then it compares it to the
known-good addresses in the database. Every known-good address
in America is sitting on our servers in the back. If it's good, the piece just
goes away, and you're done. If it matches a couple of good addresses, then you'll get a list and
you'll choose out of that list, which is the address you were trying for. It makes it a whole lot faster
than typing out the entire things. - "Key in the first three characters
of the first word in the city name." Okay, first character of the second word. Two character state or
territory of abbreviation. - It's the 3+1 rule. It's the same
for the street addresses. - Okay. "Press the Go key when ready." Go. So that is LE TMS. - Oh. 3+1 rule. If there's not three characters,
you got to do a space. - Ah, okay. - Now, you've got to clear
it out with the Enter key. - So that is LE, space, TMS. - C/S key.
- C/S, oh, "city/state". Got it, okay. - Some pieces are buffered
and some pieces are live. That live mail will be
sitting on a conveyor belt, going around the machine. Those flats and those packages,
if we don't key them in 90 seconds and get the information
back to that machine, it dumps it off into a reject bin and somebody has to hand sort that. So for the letters, they run them
through the machine one time, they store them off to the side. A few hours later, they put them in the
machine the second time, anticipating that we've processed
everything that was missing. - Oh. I'm guessing that's, like...
"Dixon Hill"? Or something like that. I can't tell if that's DIC or DX... - Unless it was...
- Ox Hill! It's Ox Hill. Okay. Oh. - Remember, these are the
easiest ones to read on the test. - I realized that. - Get ready. Every year, we have
fewer and fewer pieces. We've got fewer people handwriting mail, and we have OCR technology
that's really good. I'll bet we went from
somewhere in the neighborhood of less than half of the mail being
read by a computer in the '90s to nearly 99% of letters
being read today. The OCRs that are reading the letter mail,
I think it's close to 99%. So we get the 1% of the junk, and we improve about
half of that 1%. - Right. - The job here may be getting harder
because pieces are harder to read. Because if the computer is
so good and can't read it, it's a lot more likely, it's not a good piece
of mail to begin with. The address was destroyed somehow, or the customer had bad
information for the address. - So they've put "Ft" Lauderdale
in the abbreviation. So I would put F-T, no matter what?
Not F-O-R? I don't autocorrect that.
- Correct. Do it how the customer did it. We're not sleuths.
We're not picking out details. You key by the rules, you type in the address information
from what you can clearly see. Now, the street address works similarly, where you'll do all the
numbers, and then 3+1. - "Ignore the direction word
and key the street name. "If the direction word is
the only word, key it." Okay. 3+1 rule. So, Go. All right. Ah, the... I looked down to find
where the numbers are! 720WES, no, yeah, that's West Boulevard. So you include that and you hit Street. 400 Little Way Street. - We have internet service
from three different providers. We have three fiber optic lines coming
into the building at different points. So if any one point gets chopped off,
we can maintain service, because we're the only REC, connected to every plant in the country,
over 300 processing plants, including Guam and
Anchorage, Alaska; and Juneau, Alaska; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's asking for numeric,
and it's in C coding, so it wants the zip code. - It wants the zip code, 35804, go. - So if both the machine can't read it and a keyer isn't able
to decipher it here, the machine at the plant
sends it to the reject bin, and then somebody will manually handle it. And then, if they can't figure it out, it would either get
returned to the sender. And if there's no
return-to-sender information, then it will go to the
Mail Recovery Center. - Okay, final test. Here we go. Numeric. We don't have a numeric. So we hit None. - Correct. - Then, it's outward, which is MOK, space, HI, C/S, 2545HEAD... Street. - Nice.
- Okay. I mean, what speed
would I have to go here? - 7,150 keystrokes per hour. - It's the speed with which
you have to read that, parse it... It's much tougher than I
thought it was going to be to keep everything in your head. And this is easy handwriting. Nothing here has been blurred. - And you haven't even gotten to the ones that are upside down or backwards, right, or packages that have four sides to them. - And it would be an
average of four seconds for each one to keep up the pace. - On average, it's about four seconds that somebody's got one
of these on their screen. - Wow. - And you did an incredible job for just learning these rules right now. I'm impressed. - All right, thank you.
I'll take that! Thank you so much.
About ~17 years ago, did remote encoding for the PO for about a year whilst earning some extra cash, and while not the same rules as this video, the keyboard is hella weird. For example, best thing I say is that the home row keys also serve as the number keys, depending on if you hit a space bar first or not. Work was mind-numbingly boring, soul crushing and depressing. No disrespect to anyone who worked there, but there were people that had been working there for 20 years and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. The rumor was, or, their reasoning was that at some point the PO was going to make that role a real PO job and not a part-time job, this would have given them all the benefits of an actual postal employee and wages to boot. The lure was that this negotiation had started years ago, and as a result, all hours would be back paid to reflect new wage, so, people were just hanging on - waiting out that big check.
But for me, it was part time work to earn extra cash before I moved, and I treated it as such, so, sorry if your mail was a little late back in 2005.
Would also like to add that I still, once in awhile, catch myself reverting back to those weird typing rules.
My dad has had several letters returned due to "illegible address". I'm kind of impressed that he had the computer AND trained personnel scratching their heads going "yeah... no idea, return that chicken scratch to sender." Haha.
I did this job for about a year back in the early 2000s! It was basically like being paid to play a very very boring video game. I still remembered the 3+1 format and the numbers being on home row before he mentioned either of them. Even though it's been like 19 years, I feel like I could jump right back into it like it was nothing.
I worked there. I was never more depressed than when I was there. I hope automation removes that entire facility from the face of the earth. 5 minute breaks. You need to clock out for your breaks. 2 minute to walk to the break room, 1 min to stare out a window, and 2 min to walk back. If I was late by 10 seconds, I’ll hear about it. All they care about is how well you can emulate a robot.
Writing in the correct address for a new piece of mail every 4 seconds? That sounds like a godawful job
A 4 second work flow sounds like fun
These people basically have Stanley's job from The Stanley Parable.
Aww wish they showed us a pro employee doing it, to see how fast they go.
There are data entry centres like this for all or most mailing companies around the world. They emphasise strict TPH (task per hour) targets in order to hire as few people as possible to save money (who work minimum wage), not a fun place to work, and people can develop severe health issues if working there long term.