Y'all don't know this, but.... my handwriting is terrible. I'll turn 34 in just a few weeks and my handwriting really hasn't improved since about 3rd grade. Today, I was writing an address on an envelope and thought "Man, this is awful". Yet, just as every other time before, my letter will end up where it's supposed to. I got to thinking about how, even with with modernization, all of these billions of pieces of mail almost always end up at the correct destination despite wide variances in handwriting - neatness, style (I have a friend that pretty much writes in Old English style), etc. Naturally I started Googling and, it turns out, the USPS has a facility in Utah that identifies illegible pieces of mail. I thought it was pretty cool so I figured I'd share: Unreadable mail ends up at the USPS Remote Encoding Facility in Salt Lake City. Where Mail With Illegible Addresses Goes to Be Read - The New York Times
So for fun, write a letter to that facility, and make sure the address is almost but not quite completely illegible. Then when it goes there and they look at it they'll say, "Hey, wait a minute...."
30 million illegible items a week. Amazing number. I once got a letter 6 months after it was mailed, with a rubber stamp on saying something like, "Found in Mailbag Believed Empty. National Mailbag Cleaning Center."
