How to Save One Day for All USPS Mail.

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17. Your handwriting may have to be deciphered in Utah

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/have-bad-handwriting-us-postal-service-has-your-back-180957629/

What with so much mail zipping around the country, odds are some of it will never reach its final destination (fingers crossed that'll include Aunt Gale's ugly Christmas sweater). That's because the service uses computers to route the mail, and about two percent of the time (about 40 million pieces of Christmastime mail), the address on a package is illegible. Bad handwriting, water damage, archaic fonts and those plastic windows on letters all cause trouble for the computers.

That's where Karen Heath and her staff at the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City step in.

"It's the handwriting, like your grandmother's, so unique that the computer has a hard time deciphering it," says Heath, manager at the center.

The U.S. Postal Service has a massive 78,000-square-foot branch, tucked away in the Utah capital, that deciphers illegible addresses. On a normal day, about 5 million pieces of mail are funneled through this branch, but as it creeps closer to December the number can be as high as 11 million, says Heath.

With just under 1,700 employees, the Center employees tackle all of the United State's illegible addresses in 33 different shifts that operate 24/7. And, according to Heath, they have a high success rate.