Transcription

Almost all the letters that get sent in the United States are processed automatically. You put a letter in a postbox, it's taken to the closest processing centre, 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 Centre, 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 Centre 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? You'll be putting your last name and first initial into that. I looked at the keyboard to look for the numbers and realized that this is a... That is not a standard keyboard. That is not a standard keyboard. Other than the quality 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 one, two, three. How to key the outward portion of a mail piece 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. Okay. 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 thing. Keying the first three characters of the first word in the city name. Okay. First character of the second word. Two character state or territory abbreviation. It's the three plus one rule. That's the same for the street addresses. Okay. Press the go key when ready. Go. So that is L-E-T-M-S. Oh. Three plus one rule. If there's not three characters, you've got to do a space. Ah, okay. I've got to clear it out with the enter key. So that is L-E space T-M-S. 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 D-I-C or D-X. Ox Hill. It's Ox Hill. Yes. Okay. Okay. Oh! Remember, these are the easiest ones to read on the test, so 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 Lorddale as an abbreviation, so I would put F-T no matter what, not F-O. Correct. I don't autocorrect that. I'll just redid it. Okay. 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 three plus one. Ignore the direction word and key the street name. If the direction word is the only word, key it. Okay. Three plus one rule. So go. All right. Ah, I looked down to find where the numbers are. 720. Where's... Yeah, that's West Boulevard. So you include that and you hit street. Yes. 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. We have 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. Got it. 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 M-O-K-space-H-I-C-S-2-5-4-5-H-E-A-D-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, like nothing here has been blurred. And you haven't even gotten to the ones that are upside down or backwards or packages that have four sides to them. Right. 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 all. I'll take that. That's, um... Thank you so much.