In the 70s I worked in the mailroom of a college that had 1500 teachers and administrators whose departments I had to learn (for $3.75/hour). We'd get those big plastic boxes full of mail, and just know that Garrido was in Athletics, Loftus was in Psychology, etc. We'd throw the mail in the slots, then rubber band them together, pack into the electric golf cart, and deliver them. I still remember dozens of names and their departments. Also Dominique, one of the receptionists in Social Studies. Sigh.
Anyway, my cousin lives in a small Virginia town, current pop. 38,000 but closer to 5,000 back then. She has a slightly unusual first name. About 25 years ago I guessed it was rare enough that whoever threw mail in the town would remember it. So I sent the mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (not her real name). No street address, no zip code. It got to her with apparently no delay.
I tried the same thing about 5 years ago but included her last name and the zip code for Gloucester. It never got to her, which makes perfect sense.
Did you include your $3.75/hour pay to imply it was a low salary?
$3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975.
You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.
When I was an undergraduate mail to "tzs, 1-59, 91126" would have probably got to me.
91126 was the zip code for Caltech undergraduate housing, which would have been sufficient to get the letter to the Caltech post office. The Caltech post office would have recognized 1-59 as the building code for Ricketts House and put it in the bundle of mail for Ricketts. The carrier there would have put it in the "T" box in the mailbox array in Ricketts lounge.
I send a fair amount of mail to addresses very near where I drop the mail-- as in, in the same ZIP, if not almost the same mail route (but not at the actual post office). I'm constantly puzzled that a) it takes a few days to reach the addressee no matter how close you drop the letter to the destination address and b) when I check, local mail is being postmarked at a regional center fifteen miles away....
A funny story went around the internet last year about a guy in Northern Ireland who received a letter that only had his first (common in Ireland) name, the town he grew up in, and a rambling description of his life story:
https://mobile.twitter.com/weefeargal/status/147906907614423...
This is a pretty good example of the things required to keep a service running reliably that likely would not be done by a commercial company with no delivery guarantee offered. I can't imagine FedEx, UPS et al going to these lengths.
This is a pretty good example of a thing that is not required to keep the service running reliably (akin to sending an IP packet with only a partial IP) and that governments, with no incentive to properly allocate Earth’s scarce resources, would typically keep running aimlessly.
If a private company contracted this job, not only would they earn money from the USPS, but they could provide the service to other companies. Lots of public and private entities need this service.
But even better - they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet.
Handwriting was such an integral part of a person. You'd almost be able to identify a close friend just by looking at their handwriting and you'd see it frequently enough on letters and things.
As someone who practices Western calligraphy and who carries a fountain pen, i can't help but feel a little sad reading articles like that prove that the written hand is dying out.
>> Handwriting was such an integral part of a person.
That's a noble thought and all but it doesn't always work like you say. I bet my school teachers would recognise my handwriting from a mile away, yet even I have trouble reading what I used to write back then. And I wrote all the time. The only time I didn't write was when I was reading (I have this weird taboo about writing on books. I'm fine with drawing stick-figure animations on the corners though; you should see my school editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, truly epic stick figure swordfights). And just to be clear, I never had any trouble with reading, nor with grammar or syntax. It was just my handwriting that was horrible.
My handwriting was what you'd call cacography, the opposite of calligraphy. It was like a chicken dipped its claws in ink and went digging for worms on the page. Very recognisable, but really not very good handwriting at all. I think it's because I was always in such a hurry to take it all down that I didn't stop to think about reading it back later.
To be honest, computer keyboards saved my writing.
As someone who was ridiculed by peers and teachers and having had grades be dropped whole letters for poor legibility, I don't share the feeling. I tried years practicing and I am skilled in other dexterous tasks, but handwriting is not one of them. I still use a fountain pen though.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. And I mean that almost literally. ‘Carrying around a fountain pen’ is definitely a bit of…fetish signalling. Dont get me wrong. I totally understand feeling sad about something that you’re into sinking further into obscurity. I’m just a little weary because it’s such Gen-X-and-above fodder to treat it as a sign of society in decline.
It's little coincidence that the last of these facilities is housed in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints contributes a significant amount to family history work, which includes reading and deciphering old records written mostly in cursive. They also encourage their members to contribute to this work. Around half of Utah's population are members of that church, so there naturally is a much larger pool of qualified cursive readers to select from there.
Not sure if this remains true today, but back when I was young you could go to your local LDS church and use their computers to search genealogical records. It may not be as useful today, but in the 80s it was some of the best stuff you could easily access.
"It can be hard, especially when you first start," Bousha explained. "A lot of them are not used to reading cursive and interpreting what they see. But after 70 hours a week it becomes like second nature."
70 hours a week just reading and typing addresses? Hopefully that's hyperbole.
Its kind of wild how critical infrastructure a reliable postal system is.
I moved to a country without one and it’s a massive headache. Letters may or may not arrive. If they dont arrive they may or may not be sent back to the original sender. I imagine some room in a government building with millions upon millions of undelivered mail.
I couldnt even get important mail from the US government. I ended up using a family member’s address in the US.
One of these centers existed in a city in which I lived, Duluth, Minnesota, from 1995-2005. It was a fairly big deal for a city the size of Duluth, employing 1,000 people to start and ranging up to 1,400 at the peak. A former employee started a FB group that has a good photo of what these centers looked like in the 90s: https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155932292850485
Maybe they should create a mobile application that uses the API of their OCR system and allows users to take a photo of the handwritten address in order to determine, before sending the letter, if it is readable or not.
I wonder how long this system will exist before ML gets good enough that it just makes more sense to send illegible mail back to the sender and say, "sorry, whatever you wrote is not a valid address, try again".
A lot of the stuff they process are actually machine printed, but for some reason the OCR just rejected. Had a bud that worked at the Utah facility, and the same sentient can be found through out the comment section of the Tom Scott video.
Never; this facility will likely continue to serve for as long as the people exchange mail.
Sure, you might say "the sender should write better", but that's needlessly discriminatory and flies in the face of what the United States Postal Service stands for. Not being able to immediately read the delivery address is not an excuse.
The USPS considers it an absolute failure to do their duty if they fail to deliver mail that was otherwise furnished properly, and I commend their commitment.
The Surface handwriting recognition has been good enough for many years to recognize my cursive handwriting, which is fairly impressive, but I do like the idea of a public service striving to be usable even by people with handwriting not easily read by a machine, just like it's usable by rural users and others who are probably not the best targets from a pure business-minded perspective.
I thought the vast majority are OCR and the humans are for the ones it fails at.
Regardless, all you have to do is tell people, say at the post office, that if they type the address and cut it out and tape it on, the mail will get there faster. Alternatively they could use a label maker to print out the address and then affix it to the envelope.
I bet people still writing address labels by hand probably mostly don't know that there's a speedup for fast machine legibility.
Can't believe how many hours I spent doing that xD
TBF the software tools for it were very helpful...plop down exhausted at the computer after 6 hours of church meetings and burn through a bunch of formal-ish handwriting data entry while half-braindead, necktie knot pulled down to the chest, black synthetic socks petting cat down on the floor, and bowl of favorite cereal at the ready. (Mormon alcohol equivalent is basically sugar)
I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that. There was a lot of interesting geography and plenty of bio-stats to read, so for natural readers it was quite a comfortable hit in its way.
I did get into handwriting analysis later and that was more consistently fascinating on the other hand. There was always an open invite to bring found samples to the next meeting (this was not a Mormon thing, to be clear).
Everyone would then take turns pointing out possibly valid observations, ooh there's a felon's claw, anybody else see that, etc. Then at the end of the meeting they'd ask the submitter to share the general or specific identity of the sample. "That's my uncle so-and-so, the rascal was on a chain gang for 10 straight years" and so on.
But sometimes you would remember seeing the sample somewhere, so you had to brace yourself because it was definitely a serial killer and you'd spend the rest of the week thinking about that sample afterward.
In the society library there were texts about individual letters...like people have authored multiple books about the written letter T, and so on.
For my part I was paid for some analysis on the side and learned the hard way that you have to kind of hold back sometimes. It's nice to know you're accurate but a lot of people just. Don't. Want. To know that others can tell this or that about them. Lol. You can effectively front-run an individual's own self-reconciliation/processing capabilities and this often brings unwanted results.
One of my own specialties was that I could usually get a good idea of someone's MBTI type through their handwriting. I had already finished my certification in Jungian typology at the time. So then, bouncing back to handwriting traits, I could identify a kind of sub-type, and this would give ideas of the various cognitive-function perspectives that were probably relevant to the individual's current stage of personality development.
I never met anyone else in the field who I could really talk to about this, though it was very useful. Sometimes you have problems in life that are less conscious, so you can't Google them, LLMs don't help, etc. As a result, finding someone who knows "people _who think like you_, and how they made it" can be really helpful.
Even took an IQ test based only on my handwriting once, pretty neat experience.
I know a few people who have been hired at this facility but washed out in the training and testing program; the speed and accuracy required to work here is outstanding and evidently quite difficult to achieve.
I think it must be at least a decade since I’ve written an actual complete sentence by hand, a paragraph certainly must have been even farther back. Maybe I should pick up a pen.
[+] [-] tomcam|2 years ago|reply
Anyway, my cousin lives in a small Virginia town, current pop. 38,000 but closer to 5,000 back then. She has a slightly unusual first name. About 25 years ago I guessed it was rare enough that whoever threw mail in the town would remember it. So I sent the mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (not her real name). No street address, no zip code. It got to her with apparently no delay.
I tried the same thing about 5 years ago but included her last name and the zip code for Gloucester. It never got to her, which makes perfect sense.
[+] [-] windowsrookie|2 years ago|reply
$3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975.
You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.
[+] [-] tzs|2 years ago|reply
91126 was the zip code for Caltech undergraduate housing, which would have been sufficient to get the letter to the Caltech post office. The Caltech post office would have recognized 1-59 as the building code for Ricketts House and put it in the bundle of mail for Ricketts. The carrier there would have put it in the "T" box in the mailbox array in Ricketts lounge.
[+] [-] unyttigfjelltol|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yowzadave|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geetee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leohonexus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philjohn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1123581321|2 years ago|reply
It’s the guaranteed pickup of any stamped paper from any mailbox that is the the marvel of USPS, when you think about it.
[+] [-] eastbound|2 years ago|reply
Then they tell us we consume too much resources.
[+] [-] echelon|2 years ago|reply
But even better - they'd build up an institutional set of training data for machine learning and could build the best handwriting recognizer on the planet.
[+] [-] noufalibrahim|2 years ago|reply
Handwriting was such an integral part of a person. You'd almost be able to identify a close friend just by looking at their handwriting and you'd see it frequently enough on letters and things.
As someone who practices Western calligraphy and who carries a fountain pen, i can't help but feel a little sad reading articles like that prove that the written hand is dying out.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|2 years ago|reply
That's a noble thought and all but it doesn't always work like you say. I bet my school teachers would recognise my handwriting from a mile away, yet even I have trouble reading what I used to write back then. And I wrote all the time. The only time I didn't write was when I was reading (I have this weird taboo about writing on books. I'm fine with drawing stick-figure animations on the corners though; you should see my school editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, truly epic stick figure swordfights). And just to be clear, I never had any trouble with reading, nor with grammar or syntax. It was just my handwriting that was horrible.
My handwriting was what you'd call cacography, the opposite of calligraphy. It was like a chicken dipped its claws in ink and went digging for worms on the page. Very recognisable, but really not very good handwriting at all. I think it's because I was always in such a hurry to take it all down that I didn't stop to think about reading it back later.
To be honest, computer keyboards saved my writing.
[+] [-] skelpmargyar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KyeRussell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
[+] [-] astrange|2 years ago|reply
Was even more surprised when I went to the UK, turned on the TV, and he was on University Challenge.
[+] [-] bennettnate5|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UberFly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juancn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blahedo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|2 years ago|reply
I moved to a country without one and it’s a massive headache. Letters may or may not arrive. If they dont arrive they may or may not be sent back to the original sender. I imagine some room in a government building with millions upon millions of undelivered mail.
I couldnt even get important mail from the US government. I ended up using a family member’s address in the US.
[+] [-] aww_dang|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nohaydeprobleme|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MKais|2 years ago|reply
And then lose their jobs.
[+] [-] masklinn|2 years ago|reply
These are not “doctor’s handwriting” issues.
[+] [-] ElfinTrousers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosito|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Operyl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
Sure, you might say "the sender should write better", but that's needlessly discriminatory and flies in the face of what the United States Postal Service stands for. Not being able to immediately read the delivery address is not an excuse.
The USPS considers it an absolute failure to do their duty if they fail to deliver mail that was otherwise furnished properly, and I commend their commitment.
[+] [-] emodendroket|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|2 years ago|reply
Regardless, all you have to do is tell people, say at the post office, that if they type the address and cut it out and tape it on, the mail will get there faster. Alternatively they could use a label maker to print out the address and then affix it to the envelope.
I bet people still writing address labels by hand probably mostly don't know that there's a speedup for fast machine legibility.
[+] [-] toast0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|2 years ago|reply
TBF the software tools for it were very helpful...plop down exhausted at the computer after 6 hours of church meetings and burn through a bunch of formal-ish handwriting data entry while half-braindead, necktie knot pulled down to the chest, black synthetic socks petting cat down on the floor, and bowl of favorite cereal at the ready. (Mormon alcohol equivalent is basically sugar)
I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that. There was a lot of interesting geography and plenty of bio-stats to read, so for natural readers it was quite a comfortable hit in its way.
I did get into handwriting analysis later and that was more consistently fascinating on the other hand. There was always an open invite to bring found samples to the next meeting (this was not a Mormon thing, to be clear).
Everyone would then take turns pointing out possibly valid observations, ooh there's a felon's claw, anybody else see that, etc. Then at the end of the meeting they'd ask the submitter to share the general or specific identity of the sample. "That's my uncle so-and-so, the rascal was on a chain gang for 10 straight years" and so on.
But sometimes you would remember seeing the sample somewhere, so you had to brace yourself because it was definitely a serial killer and you'd spend the rest of the week thinking about that sample afterward.
In the society library there were texts about individual letters...like people have authored multiple books about the written letter T, and so on.
For my part I was paid for some analysis on the side and learned the hard way that you have to kind of hold back sometimes. It's nice to know you're accurate but a lot of people just. Don't. Want. To know that others can tell this or that about them. Lol. You can effectively front-run an individual's own self-reconciliation/processing capabilities and this often brings unwanted results.
One of my own specialties was that I could usually get a good idea of someone's MBTI type through their handwriting. I had already finished my certification in Jungian typology at the time. So then, bouncing back to handwriting traits, I could identify a kind of sub-type, and this would give ideas of the various cognitive-function perspectives that were probably relevant to the individual's current stage of personality development.
I never met anyone else in the field who I could really talk to about this, though it was very useful. Sometimes you have problems in life that are less conscious, so you can't Google them, LLMs don't help, etc. As a result, finding someone who knows "people _who think like you_, and how they made it" can be really helpful.
Even took an IQ test based only on my handwriting once, pretty neat experience.
[+] [-] dylanpyle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graupel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bookofjoe|2 years ago|reply
https://archive.ph/WuZhn
>What Killed Penmanship? We’re all texters and typers now, so if you can’t read that grocery list you scrawled, you are not alone.
https://archive.ph/6mm4j
[+] [-] expertentipp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElfinTrousers|2 years ago|reply