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Somebody really needs to donate an atlas to the Postal Service


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the Christmas cards to the North pole. The JP post office branch couldn't figure out my address and so returned Christmas cards to the sender. I have wondered whether the JP post office branch is the worst in the nation. Surly staff that take 10 minutes to find an envelope, unable to forward Christmas cards. Was the processed through the JP office or is there a Roxbury office in competition for highest level of incompetence.?

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Since it's postmarked Portland, OR. Robots seem to have reading issues. It probably helps to write AIR MAIL on your overseas mail.k

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That handwriting makes my brain hurt.

I'm betting it made robot brains hurt, too. Except there IS a bar code with the postage ... and that probably says "send me to England you stupid robots!"

I received a similar misplaced mailing last summer, and it was part scrawled address, part first "match" found going down the zip codes.

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I can't read it, I don't think I'd be able to tell you where that was supposed to go even if it was my job to figure out such things. But one place I know that isn't destined for is an address in Boston.

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21 Warwick Road, Wanstead, London.

I used to work with a lot of doctors, so I got good at deciphering handwriting. And when I couldn't, I wasn't above faxing something I couldn't read to their office with a cover page asking "What does this say?"

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The barcode in the postage is for proof that the stamp legit. It has nothing to do with the destination of the letter.

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I don't think the barcode on the postage has anything to do with the recipient address. It's probably just to identify the account number of the post office who printed the postage (or person if it's one of those print-at-home / Pitney Bowes things), plus some sort of digital signature to authenticate it.

And the barcode along the bottom of the envelope probably says send it to Boston, as it was put on there by the OCRing robots that couldn't read that "E11 2D2" (or is that "E11 202" or "E11 2n2") postal code in the first place.

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My family in Ireland has similar handwriting, so reading that for me was easy.

Perhaps the USPS shouldn't have gotten rid of the guy who can ready handwriting from the British Isles.

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I've been pretty seriously dressed down by postal clerks in Greater Paris for my having put USA instead of Etats-Unis on the recipient's address.

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You'd think that Parisians would have more important things to worry about but never underestimate petty bureaucrats.

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a lot of people had handwriting like that. Not sure what it was called, but I always assumed it was just the local variant of cheerleader bubble.

The bar code was done at the Portland post office rather than by the sender. That's a good strategy because only one machine has to do the slow handwriting translation and all the other machines only need to be able to read barcodes. The problem is, of course, garbage in, garbage out.

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I'm guessing this letter was probably stuck to another on and the machines made a mistake. It could have been frozen to another letter. It has been freezing here lately. This is 1 letter out of how many correctly delivered letters you have received in your lifetime? Mistakes happen. Instead of posting a public complaint why don't you show some appreciation for someone who works 8+ hours in the freezing cold.

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The problem is obviously in sorting, as people in the area are getting these fairly regularly now.

So isn't a single letter carrier problem, anyway.

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The letter carrier is the last line of defense. If they don't catch it there's no one else to blame.

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They don't have time to. It comes bundled for them in most locations.

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distribution and processing center in Boston, next to South Station. It's over 1 million square feet of space, operates 24/7/365. Many people would be surprised or shocked at what your mail goes through before reaching you or it's intended destination. Many humans handle and process your mail, in addition to robots and of course machines, and there's a million ways something could go wrong. That by far most mail and packages get to their intended recipient is a testament to how good a job the P.O. actually does. And the USPS also handles a lot of UPS stuff, most UPS deliveries outside major metro areas are actually delivered most of the way by the USPS since UPS doesn't have a distrubution infrastructure nearly as large and sophisticated as USPS, who deliver mail and packages, by law, everywhere in the country, no matter how off the beaten track.

This time of year sees very heavy volume for the P.O., so you're more likely to see incidents like this. But these misdelivered cards and letters are just a tiny fraction of the whole, they stand out for the amusement factor. Yes, somebody at some point, especially the actual mail deliverer, should have flagged the incorrect mail. The P.O. is today using a lot of part timers, casuals, seasonal help, etc., and has an acute shortage of letter carriers. The older workers who have spent decades working f/t at the USPS and are well paid with excellent benefits are retiring and just biding their time until retirement, and they are being replaced by mostly 'casuals'', people who get 1 year contracts and are rehired on a yearly basis, with far lower pay and less benefits, so there's considerable chaos and uncertainty.

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The two main problems are computers attempting to read illegible handwriting and new staff trained to be fast, not accurate. I've been a letter carrier for close to 30 years and have witnessed the job go down hill. It's all numbers driven, to hell with customer service.

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You folks take a lot of flack, and you so have my respect. My housemate's brother is a postal employee for going on 15 years. The stories I've heard (particularly about Management vs Functional; cutting down on staff via attrition, etc) are awful.

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All is not lost, I know a few good letter carriers, and one of the regular guys on my street is a nice guy, I've noticed when the lazy paper delivery people (not even kids anymore, older people with an SUV) completely miss the porch throwing the paper from their car, he picks it up and puts it in the door with our mail. Sad that it may only be "a few good men" left.

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The going theory on this, I seem to recall, is that the optical character recognition system they're currently using is misreading these UK addresses. Faulty optical character recognition software (OCR) starts by misinterpreting the British postal code as an American ZIP code, ends up thinking it sees "02xxx," then tries to do its best from there. There have been examples of people living at the same address in the Boston area as these addresses in London, so -- once the OCR software picks the wrong city/state/country -- at least it can get that right.

If you think this is bizarre, check out this even more bizarre example, where a photocopier (which isn't even supposed to OCR, but make as-is copies) was replacing whole digits in photocopies with other digits because of overzealous compression algorithms.

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What I think is happening is that the system does not detect a valid zipcode, so it sends it to the first "79 Thatsit Road" it finds, starting with addresses in the first zip code and moving through the directory in order.

Guess who has the lowest zipcodes and a lot of British names?

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The absolute lowest price for a First-Class international stamp for a letter envelope is $1.15 for up to a one ounce letter.

That 90 cent stamp and smartcode told the machinery it is First class domestic - probably a heftier score to keep it in the system rather than kick it out for human review.

It took me a minute but I can now see the 02121 Zip in the E11 2?2 Postal Code. The middle 1 in E11 looks very much like a 2 to an optical reader. And of course the word London can score pretty high when trying to pigeonhole Boston for the win.

As for the final stages of delivery at the local PO where postal employees had to look at it.... the machinery signed off on it. The little bars at the bottom of the envelope say so. Let it ride.

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I was having issues with my mail not getting delivered (like, no mail for four weeks; new credit cards went missing; Second Notices arriving for bills I didn't even know existed.)

So I went to the trusty Allston Post Office (02134 woot!) and waited on a gigantically long line behind a bunch of other people also complaining that their mail was missing as well.

The manager yelled at me (actually yelled, not scolded...yelled with a raised angry voice) that "the mailmen shouldn't have to figure out which mail goes in which boxes."

That's their only job, to put the mail in the boxes!

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Apparently you have no idea what actually a letter carrier does. We are not mind readers. Put your name on your mail box and use your apartment number. If you move, fill out a change of address card. If you have someone staying with you, use C/O in the address. I could go on and on. Somethings the customer can be their own worst enemy.

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Box was properly labeled, typed out, with the names of the tenants and apartment numbers on each box in the exact same spot. The boxes were USPS endorsed and labeled according to regulation as listed on the USPS website. By far, the nicest, classiest mail setup I've ever had in my years of apartment living.

Missing mail was always typed and properly addressed. Credit card bills, magazines, etc.

This was the only apartment I have ever lived in where my properly-addressed mail went missing for weeks. That is unacceptable.

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That's not a stamp you buy now and put on a letter later. That's a stamp that the post office puts on a letter when you bring it to the counter and pay to have it mailed right now. The post office charged the wrong price and everything went wrong from there.

90 cents is the cost of a two-ounce domestic first-class letter with a non-standard (square) shape.

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It looks a little like postage printed at the post office carrier, but it's actually a self printed stamp from a computer based postage meter program (Stamps.com). I used them a lot in the past. The basic cost is not wrong for a 1 oz letter to the UK; whether the shape requires more postage, I'm not well versed enough on.

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Back in the Day, I used to work for a little Music Store in Piano Alley, with a pretty obvious (and maybe therefore?) iconic name. You'd not believe how stuff would end up in America from all over the world with just our store name and Boston, MA. Was amazing!

Though there's been much improvement in the area of Optical Character Recognition in recent years, machines are still largely GIGO. Humans can interpret even the worst handwriting with much better success.

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