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Think somebody at the Postal Service should get a globe for Christmas?

Another letter for England that wound up in Boston

ChrisInEastie thought the post about the letter addressed to England that wound up in Boston was pretty funny. Then he got home and found his very own example. He reports he lives on White Street in East Boston, not White Cross in Wootton, Abingdon, which is roughly 3,000 miles to our right.

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Comments

is just too hard for Gen-Y USPS workers to deal with.

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The post office hasn't exactly been hiring many new people, and the old ones tend to stay on. The USPS has been heavy into mechanized mail handling for some time. This will continue until the baby boomers retire.

Actually, younger people typically know the globe than people who weren't even shown maps of their own town growing up, let alone geography of anywhere. Geography disappeared from education around here for about 30 years!

In any case, this is likely the work of computerized scanning and mail handling equipment, not humans.

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Back when I worked for Bay Networks, when there was a Bay Networks, I was a support engineer for premier accounts and USPS was one of them. I got to visit some USPS facilities and see the sort machines at larger sites. They were pretty impressive. All the mail of reasonable dimensions got scanned and had computer handwriting recognition done and translated into the bar code strips. So, handwriting recognition is not new. What couldn't be recognized was kicked out for manual handling.

The latest issues appear to result from some new, improved algorithms to lower handwriting recognition failures. Unfortunately they fail to include info about other countries and noting that way more postage was applied than needed for US delivery.

BTW, its also been proposed that scanning of both to and from addresses and storing them for the NSA to analyze for connection webs has been proposed, and for all we know, might already be taking place!

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This sounds like a machine (sorter) problem. Not a human problem. It's too strange and it's repeating. Oh, and don't be jumping all over the baby boomers. I work with a young'un who thinks St. Louis is on the gulf coast and New Orleans is in another country.

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MSNBC, FOX NEWS, AND CNN WILL BE DOING AROUND THE CLOCK COVERAGE OF MAIL NOT GETTING TO THEIR DESTINATION, THIS IS THE MOST COVERAGE ABOUT MAIL HAS GOTTEN SINCE TED KACZYNSKI

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I'm surprised it wasn't delivered to (our) Hyde Park.

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Blanking out the address is rather quaint. Unlike zip codes in the US which blanket an entire region, post codes are very specific. At most one will cover just a handful of buildings.

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If you use the +4 code. Oftentimes these give a single address, or, at most, a city block.

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Got a letter Saturday from Missouri addressed for UK also. Best I could figure, the city in UK is "Cambridge," the street address is similar, and, key, the UK ZIP had letter characters that, if you squinted just right and were insistent on interpreting as numerals, could have been my zip code. So, chalk it up to new ICR/OCR at post office....

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Not enough postage and also should say AIR MAIL on it for delivery to the UK

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according to the calculator at USPS.com . The photo of the envelope is cropped and I bet there's one more 5-cent stamp off to the right.

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The post office is clearly busy at this time of the year, and with all the budget woes they have been having, it's not overly surprising that mistakes like this happen and are not caught by someone.

That said, the post office in West Roxbury this morning was quite the disaster - about 20 people in line before the office even opened, and upon opening, only one poor staff member was able to assist the masses, but not before dealing with a troublesome computer.

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