How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting 

That 1.2 billion images stat seemed unbelievable, but it makes sense when you break down the numbers: it works out to an average of 38 images per second, which is about right for the number of staff there!

This is a rare job that is both of these things: 1. It gets harder every day. 2. It becomes less necessary every day.

Imagine doing a Captcha every 4 seconds for a living. Mad respect, I would go crazy.

It makes sense now. Eliminating cursive writing from schools was just part of the U.S. Postal Service’s business strategy.

Oh, wow. I worked at the Salt Lake REC for several years. Whenever this place comes up in the news, it's described as the place where bad handwriting is deciphered. But in my time there, I spent more time looking at printed addresses that for some reason couldn't be read by the automated systems than looking at handwritten addresses. Also, once you learn the rules, applying them becomes automatic and extremely fast. It's a fun job for the right person.

About 40 years ago, I wanted to send a letter to a girl in America because she appeared in our Dutch newspaper for having saved a swan that was shot with an arrow. All I had was her first name, the name of her town and the picture from the newspaper, being an optimistic kid, I just glued the photo on the envelope, added her name and town, and to my amazement the letter got delivered: A few weeks later I received a thank-you note in return. Kudos to the US postal service.

Only slightly-irrelevant, but I’m continually amused by the oft-repeated observation that the American “Post Office” delivers the mail, while the British “Royal Mail” delivers the post.

I once carried mail in the rain, and pocketed a letter from a customer. The rain made it into my jacket during a hard pour and when I unloaded it at the station, I saw it was smudged. I asked the supervisor what I should do and he said “It still has a return address, let Salt Lake have a go at it”. I heard back that the customer got it through. The REC is amazing.

I worked at this exact REC from 2008-2009 as someone who did what Tom is learning here. You're expected to type at a MINIMUM of 7000 characters per hour (Ah, the specified 7150 later in the video), which can be very difficult to do because that only give you AT MOST about 2-3 seconds per piece of mail (they say ~4 seconds later, but you, as the keyer, choose the speed; you just get in trouble if you go past that 4s mark too much, because the scanners physically can't scan the next piece of mail until you finish the piece you're on). The training that Tom goes through lasts... a week or two? I can't remember exactly, but then you're sent out on the live floor and have three months of probation to hit that 7000 mark. If you don't meet that minimum, you're just let go when probation ends because, quite honestly, you are nothing more than a seat warmer there. I developed major tendonitis from working here, but they refused to pay workers comp unless I got a $4000 procedure done to prove that it was due to working there that caused it. And they wouldn't pay that $4000 if they saw any evidence that it could have been caused by something outside of my work. Not that outside factors DID cause it, but that outside factors COULD HAVE caused it. So I opted to go to college instead since that was almost a full years worth of tuition at a state university. Fun fact, mail from the Seattle, WA mail processing center was the clearest and easiest to read. I think they actually cleaned the camera on occasion; centers back east, particularly Worcester, MA, would have giant smears of ink on every single image that prevented reading any mail whatsoever, and they'd never do anything to try and clear up the camera. Also, it's not all handwritten mail that we'd see: very clear, printed addresses still couldn't be read sometimes, and only part of that was due to the address not being in that database of known addressed mentioned at the beginning of the video. Another fun fact: until recently, almost all addresses in Utah (or at least in the most populous county [Salt Lake County]), are a grid of N, E, S, W, so an address would be, like, 1350 W. 15600 S., and this stupid addressing encoding system wasn't designed for that, so the house number in this example is "1350", and the address portion is "W. 15600 S.". The 3+1 rude didn't really work well at all here, which was infuriating working at the SLC REC. Since almost everyone here writes the cardinal abbreviation, IIRC you'd do "W_ _S", and then have to pick from a list of ALL addresses that have the same house number and directions, but find the correct second number, of which there could be many. It's a stupid, rigid system, imho.

I like how from an outside perspective this seems like the less advanced side of mail management when 99% of it is done with literal walls of computers, but from an internal view the humans here are the most advanced handwriting interpreting systems available that the computers have to fall back on.

I can't believe that every time a doctor writes a letter it goes through this processing facility. Fascinating!

I am an archivist and therefore, reading handwriting is one the key skills required for the job. However, I bow down in awe in regards to the speed at which those people are parsing the adresses. I could never achieve that. I am happy to have the luxury of taking as much time as I need for a proper transcription. Also, I should point out that I work in Germany and the old German cursive is both a joy to read and an infuriating experience at some times. Trying to transcribe stuff from the 19th century is still easier than medieval writing by many orders of magnitude.

I work here and the speed is actually easier than you think. Those examples were so legible! My favorite is cursive and backwards letters/numbers on top of bad hand writing. Now that’s hard. XD

Would've been cool if you included a "master" doing it to see how fast they do it

Top tip from an ex-postie in the UK: Don't use red envelopes, but if you do, always write the address on a white sticker or label and attach that. The lasers that read the address can't pick up the writing so well with a red background. They have a similar problem with metallic envelopes, so the sticker rule applies here, too. If they can't be read by machine, they have to be hand sorted, and this potentially adds days to the delivery time. We would get lorry loads at Christmas and Valentine's, and we were just an average sized town. Also, always put a return address, even if it is just your house number and postcode. That simple act could save your item from being permanently lost if the delivery address is damaged/defaced/missing.

Why am I watching a video about the REC? This is literally the best job I've ever had. I miss that job so much. Great bosses, nobody breathing down your neck, listening to music or podcasts your entire shift... If my health hadn't taken a long jump off a short pier, I'd still be there.

I will be hand writing my mail as bad as possible to keep these people in a job.

I love that this guy genuinely likes his job. He seems very happy to tell everyone how it works. So refreshing!

I did this as a temp job for the Christmas season like 15 years ago. For an anti-social computer nerd it was almost a dream job, pop on some headphones and just mash buttons for 8 hours. At the time the money wasn't bad either, somewhere in the $14/hour range as a transitional employee (temp). I got offered a full time spot a couple months after the season ended but turned it down, which ended up being a good move as they closed the facility just before the next holiday season. As mind numbing as it looks, eventually your brain just keys in on the specific spots you need to check and you button mash your way through it in a blur. The days actually flew by most of the time.

I can only imagine just how soul draining this job might be. Whenever you're not on break, you're on constant vigilance and work to keep up a tight pace.

I have actually done something called ‘reverse indexing' that teaches a computer to read handwriting in old records. This speeds up the indexing of census records in particular allowing the records to be released earlier. Computer recognition is getting more and more sophisticated. It’s amazing to see it in action, even if it’s briefly.

I work there! got to talk to Tom for a minute after he filmed this one, super nice guy. Thanks for coming.

I’ve worked in this very building for most of my 18 year career. It’s definitely not for everyone, but I love this crazy organization! This video is the best one I have seen yet. You are a lot of fun to watch and Ryan does such a great job of explaining how the technology works. He’s a computer nerd to his core. 😊 Really great video!

Ohh, now I see why my mail was never delivered to Santa

I used to work there. As soon as newbies get out of probation, they're allowed to listen to music/podcasts on personal headphones so it's not as mind-numbing as people assume. After enough experience it became easy to enter a state of flow and breeze through a workday while I jammed out to my custom playlist. One image every four seconds on average was more than achievable when most images only need five keystrokes to process. The down-side is that they were perpetually understaffed to the point that mandatory 12-hour shifts three or four days per week became the norm every week for two and a half years. Turnover rates were exceptionally high. The HR department didn't expect anyone to have a life outside of work and treated everyone like interchangeable and disposable cogs in the machine. The only time off I was allowed to take was to attend funerals. Any attempts to get my schedule changed were met with deflection, diversion, and denial. I'd probably still be there working (mostly) happily if HR hadn't attempted to transfer me to graveyard shift in a different facility despite my recorded disapproval. Don't get me wrong; The pay was good and I found the work enjoyable for my personality type. However, the bureaucratic upper management was a nightmare. As the old saying goes, "you don't quit jobs; you quit bosses."

This reminds me of something Terry Pratchett wrote into one of his Discworld novels. The Ankh-Morpork Postal Service had a Dead Letter Office, which dealt with mail that was addressed... creatively, let's say, by the frequently lazy, illiterate and/or insane citizens of Ankh-Morpork. The joke being that the staff weren't just reading illegible addresses, but also interpreting the vague details to figure out where the sender actually intended the letter to go. The people employed in the Office were noted for being particularly sharp; the kinds of people who would complete cryptic crosswords in their heads for fun.

Assuming all 810 employees process 1.2 billion images per year and accounting for weekends and federal holidays and no vacations this branch processes over 5,900 images per person per day. Knowing that not all employees actually process these images and providing vacations raises this number even higher. If the average time a letter is on the screen then you're looking at over 7200 letters per day per employee while keeping a recently 120 keystrokes per minute. Kudos to those employees! Side note at 2:45 I never knew all those street suffixes existed.

Watching this to reassure myself that my grandmas mail will get to its destination

As a USPS Automation Clerk and On The Job Instructor who regularly runs and assists DIOSS and AFCS machines, it's amazing to finally see what the REC site is like. They do fantastic work to get rejected mail turned around back into readable, barcoded mail in only a few hours.

I can't even imagine how it's possible to do this job as quickly and accurately as required, but I'm sure glad there are people who can do it.

I worked at one of these 20 years ago. It's mind numbing work. Typing nearly nonstop your entire shift

this job seems soul crushing

"we have 3 fiber optic lines coming into the building at different points..." I know a datacenter who had the same kind of setup, unfortunately, all the fibers ended in the same pipe a few kilometers away and a machine broke this pipe 😀

Cool topic, but a few things I'd have loved to see: 1. The difficult examples you guys kept mentioning 2. A pro doing it 3. How do the people there like their job? To me it seems soul crushing but maybe they enjoy the flow state? 4. What's the bottleneck for automated processing? Machine learning has gotten so good that I wonder what kind of image can be processed in four second by a human but not by a machine given that there are billions of training examples.

My dad worked in LaGuardia as a mail processor and union rep. I remember as a child there was so much mail going through there and it seemed like it was all being hand sorted. I can't believe that it has gotten so automated since I was a kid, but it also makes perfect sense. The used to be shouting locations out as they threw the packages to each other to get them on the right conveyor belts.

I’m so proud that my professor, the late Dr. Sargur Srihari of Computer Science department at SUNY Buffalo, was responsible for the amazing OCR that Ryan Bollock referred to. He was considered a pioneer in this space. The USPS funded our lab. So the core of the USPS was invented right here in the good old US of A 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Wow! My mind is blown that there is still one left. I retired in 2000 as a technician babysitting this system at Chula Vista, CA on graveyard shift. We were shutdown in phase two as handwriting recognition software improved. When I was working, 300 operators were idle. Best job I ever had in the USPS.

I kinda wished we could have seen how quickly an employee does this. Even if you couldn't have filmed an employee there working, a demonstration by Ryan going through the training material would have sufficed. I know I felt, just watching Tom's speed, "I could have done the same with my own keyboard," so I really wanted to see the difference between the average person and someone trained for the job. Still, very cool to see.

Loving how the most re-watched portion of the video is of the "Where to send letters to Santa Claus" sign

Besides the fact that this actual job is insane, it's also really insane that the computer systems are now so good that it only takes 810 people to read the horrible handwriting of 330,000,000 people

I did this job for the Royal Mail for a short time. The training was brutal because of the speed you had to process them. The upside was that we were mandated a 10 minute break every hour

It's thanks to these guys that doctors can send any mail at all, the true heroes of the modern world

This is... Really cool. I love that it shows the U.S. Post Office is actually incredibly innovative, and really always has been for such a large country with so much rural landscape to cover - yet here we are, with politicians actively trying to destroy and privatize one of the pillars of communication and economy (yes, economy. Many Post Offices used to double as banks backed by the Federal Government for rural communites that didn't have access to major private institutions.)

Every teacher that has had to correct an exam of mine would be employee of the month here

Tom's ability to get interviews and demonstrations at these obscure places always amazes me!

I actually did this job for Royal Mail as a Christmas Temp in my second year of university (did night shifts whilst attending lectures, tough). And what they say about pace and accuracy at the end is really true. Royal Mail always tracked your letters processed per hour (the minimum was 750 letters per hour iirc, and people were let go if they didn't make it) and sampled your letters to ensure your accuracy was to standard (can't remember now, but I think it was over 80%?). I only did it for two months but peaked at 1500 letters per hour (or about 25 letters a minute, so nearly 1 every 2 seconds) with over 95% accuracy. The concentration required was tough, especially as there were multiple things that had their own shortcuts you had to remember. (plus certain countries, like the US, China and India, paid for us to process their letters before they left the UK so you had to learn THEIR postal rules as well.) But I actually kind of enjoyed it. (And yes, if it was a slow night we did read your postcards haha.) This video brought back alot of memories of those night shifts and I can very much relate! Even if their rules were a little different. Thanks! :)

I did a somewhat similar job to this, except it was data conversion at the IRS, transcribing paper tax returns into the ISRP system. It seems mind numbingly boring at the beginning, but after your training when you get the live work, it becomes much easier and quicker for your brain to get into a groove. The training has a lot of challenging and complex scenarios to prep you for just about anything you might encounter on someone's taxes, but for the most part the live work was really easy, with only a couple pages in each tax form for the majority of the work. I remember the days flying by, as I would sit at my workstation listening to music or a good podcast, only getting up for a break or lunch. It was one of the easiest and chill jobs I've ever done, and I'd do it again if I could.

As someone with terrible handwriting and often end up botching the address and having to write over letters, thank you for your service

As someone working for a department in US State gov, it's a bit therapeutic to see someone having to interact with the particular kind of weird quirks state/fed systems and processes have.

i worked at one of these facilities in the 90’s in texas. Our location processed all mail going in and out of colorado. You had to train for 2 weeks learning the short cuts for zip codes and street addresses. Once you started encoding real mail.. your computer was randomly monitored to check your accuracy. If, by the end of the month you had something like a 97% accuracy.. you would get a bonus. I was obsessed with being fast an accurate so I had a friend write a program in javascript that mimicked the program at work. I would practice for hours at home. all in all.. it was a fun job

I'm so impressed by the post office. Everytime I think I have all the information I need to justify my amazement over the job they do I learn more, and it just blows my mind!

I'm a postman in Sweden, and at my office we get mail from a central processing terminal which we hand sort to the individual adresses and then deliver them. I've always wondered how the machine reads really unclear handwriting and still manages to send it to the correct post office! I don't know if it's the same here, but maybe it's something similar. Very cool.

An old teacher of mine once got a Christmas card addressed to "Mr Hall, House with big brown dog, Oxfordshire, England" sent from ex-student of his in Zimbabwe - recognised the handwriting -and accepted it. Only took a week and a half from being sent to arrival and the Postie won a crate of beer for getting it right. Beat that, computers! :)

The United States Postal Service does a lot of work to ensure that mail goes where it needs to! And they're funded through revenue from stamps and service fees.... so if you'd like to support the USPS, they have an online store where they sell stamps (of course) as well as collectors items, cards, puzzles, toys, and even clothes! :D

As an employee who works in an distro center in automation, finally learning what OCR means and what happened to the clear mail going to the reject bin is very satisfying, thank you.

So this is how every one of my husband's letters is processed. Fascinating! Just wish I had that technology to read his grocery lists.

I love how, at 3:59, there’s just randomly art from the game ‘Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time’ on the screen. Probably just the employee personalising their dashboard.

I'd imagine this is a lot more difficult if you weren't raised in the US. It didn't occur to me until watching this, how much culture impacts place names, and by extension, what we expect places to be named. He says "you're not a sleuth, you key by the rules" but at some point, being able to tell what letter was written is a question of predicting the word.

Hello Tom, I just want to say I love you're informative videos, and never stop them from ending! Information is power, and you spread power to all those who watch you. Much love, NightsLights.❤❤❤

Thankyou for not showing the mail like most youtubers would, You sir are one of the best and most thoughtful youtubers

As an IT engineer, I can assure you that the Excel spreadsheet at 3:59 is what nightmares are made of.

They put in alot more effort than exam graders in the UK, we're told if it's too hard to read they just won't bother 😅

tom scott is like that teacher that you wish you could hug and tell them you are proud of them and never stop. thanks tom.

WOW! I had no idea. And 4 seconds to evaluate each.. Tom, I cannot believe the incredibly interesting places you discover. Simply incredible what they do.

As a programmer, the idea of having to write a system to parse addresses just immediately gives me a migraine, and that's without even having to decipher handwriting.

I swear to god Tom Scott’s ability to release a video on a topic I was GENUINELY wondering the previous day is astounding. He did the same thing when I bought a radio clock. This dude is spying on me.

Thank you for always answering questions that I never knew I had.

My dad has worked for the USPS around 26 years and knows about this place, yet never knew how it worked. Great video!

This is so cool! I’m a USPS rural carrier and I had no idea this place existed. It’s amazing how much work goes into getting the mail to us every day. Thank you for the video!!

I worked at this very center for a short time. The hours were exhausting, but the pay was great. Once you get up to speed as a new data entry drone, you're allowed a headphone in while working so you can listen to music or audiobooks. I listened to the entire Song of Ice and Fire series while working there.

This is the nerdiest video I geeked out on because when Tom finally got it! I felt so proud🥹

I did this for 7 years and 9 months at the remote encoding facility in east Pittsburgh. From 1995-2003. Thanks for the memories.

It would have been really cool to see a pro take on those addresses after Tom, for a speed comparison. The numbers mentioned for speed are not very tangible conceptually, but actually seeing a pro key them in would have been awesome.

I used to do this job for nearly 10 years, at this location! Nice to see that microcosm get some exposure, it's a lot harder than it looks!

I really like that the keyboard has home row numbers. They actually thought about how to improve the terrible keyboard design of a default keyboard and made it more efficient

Ergonomic Engineers and Industrial Engineers are the ones who do the studies to develop those specialized keyboards. Working for the USPS as an Engineer was the most fascinating job I ever had. I worked on tons of interesting and complicated stuff. It was foolish of me to leave that job.

1:39 Tom walks up like a GTA character starting a mission

As a Royal Mail Postie this was interesting! Here, at least at the depots I've been a part of, any mail that isn't sorted by the machine has to be hand sorted by employees at the depot itself. Similarly, if it doesn't scan into the mailing system correctly it has to be entered in by hand using the long number below the barcode, and if that doesn't work its added on-route as an adhoc delivery using the address.

Honestly, that was REALLY informative! I enjoyed that a lot!

Us postal service has algorithm to sort bad handwritten mail Me: *its showtime*

It’s all fun and games until I send a letter with my Egyptian hieroglyph handwriting

"Dude your hand writing is a REC!" :D I used to have a colleague, he absolutely hated hand writing, he'd write everything on his laptop. His hand writing was so terrible we nearly didn't get housed in one of the local military base housing units here in Czechia because he had to fill up a card. By hand. And the clerk at the desk won't help him. :D To be fair, I used to write terribly too. But I've got kinda conscious about that and re-learned hand writing at a certain point, making my own hand written font in the process.

I'm super glad there are people willing to do this important job because this looks like hell on earth to me

Thanks for the trip down memory lane Tom. I worked at the Chula Vista REC in '98, '99. Even back then the writing was on the wall with how good the OCR readers were going to get, so I moved on before that REC was closed down.

One time my handwriting was so bad on a letter, they literally sent it between 5 post offices for a month. I did the math and the letter traveled 600 miles because no one wanted to figure out where it was supposed to go

Patting myself on the back for keeping the staff of this facility employed with my atrocious handwriting.

This was an eye opener. Loved it!

It really worked for me after I look and try some tutorials, yours is the one that worked. Owe you a lot.

The outward/inward thing totally makes sense to me: The outward section of the address (city/state/zip) is used for getting the mail from one distro center to another distro center; it's being read in the 'outbound' room of the site that collected the mail from wherever you dropped it of (or more realistically the nearest distribution hub, but whatever). They don't care about the street address yet, they're just trying to get the letter from its start point to the correct post office that serves the target zip code. The inward part of the address (street address) is the part that's important for getting from the local post office to your mailbox. It's used in the 'inbound' room of the site that's receiving mailbags from a truck and sorting it for local delivery.

This is something I've actually always wondered about, and I never expected it to be its own facility/job. A question I forgot I had, answered. Not to mention the small notice of the Santa Mail is a fascinating insight into more of it without a word uttered.

This is one of the oddest topics for someone to think about, and the fact that it's covered in such good detail is truly incredible.

Absolutely love your videos!

2:28 i'd like to think that tom laughed like this simply because he said seamen

My favorite thing I learned in this video is that USPS commonly handles tetrahedral packages.

This was awesome...always wondered how things at the Post Office worked!

When your reading the paper and a journalist writes (complains) about the Post Office / Postal Service spending X£ Billion on a new system, it's very easy to overlook it as a total package. Just watching this, thinking about all the development for the training system, the manager dashboards, the integration to the mail centres, it's almost mind blowing, until you realise it works. Incredible.

In the 1990's I was involved in a small contract dealing with these REC machines and systems. Even then, some 30 years ago it was impressive how fast the machines processed each image. Imaged, OCR'd, either routed or diverted for human reading, then either returned in with route information or sent to slower reading, or 'dead lettered'. FYI, the machines print a bar-code strip on the front of the letter for further handling so the address only has to be 'read' once. Some commercial mail got discount pricing if they printed the proper bar-code strip ahead of time (I think that's what they called 'pre-sorted' mail)

I feel like I've subconsciously had this question since I was five years old

This is fascinating! Love it!

I worked in the UK equivalent (MDEC, Manual Data Entry Centre) so this was cool to see how its processed similarly, although with mainly different hotkeys, but esentially the same