A Parcel's Travels - Humans Do It Better

Every family has legendary stories that get told over over and over and passed down through generations. One of the stories in my family involves the United States Postal Service, which has existed since Ben Franklin was the first Postmaster. 


Over the 250 year history of the country, letters and packages have made it to their destinations through the hard work and dedication of the men and women of the system. That service and dedication has been told in print and film countless times, from tales of the Pony Express to Kevin Kostner’s The Postman. 

My first wife and I lived in Racine, Wisconsin for over 40 years. We moved four times - from apartments to a house to a condo and had always received our mail on time. We had been our second apartment for a couple of years when my wife’s grandmother sent us a card from where she lived in Mishicot, up North about 120 miles from us. We got the card two days later, but had to laugh and marvel.  

Grandma Josie’s handwriting wasn’t the best. She was, after all, 85 years old. What got us wondering, though, was how the postal service was able to deliver an envelope that simply was addressed:



Tim and Cathie

Racine

I wish I had saved that envelope, but I’M NOT MAKING THAT UP!

Racine was populated with about 85000 people, the second largest city in the state at the time. Maybe if the card’s route was reversed and we addressed it “Grandma Josie, Mishicot,” it would have made sense. I mean how many Grandma Josie’s could be in a town of 750 folks? 

The men and women of the postal system had a job and they did it. Today, however, a lot of their work is done by machines and that’s where the trouble starts. 

A friend sent me a poster that I had been looking for. It was in a sturdy tube and eventually got to me via a rather circuitous route. For the fourteen bucks my friend spent, it was supposed to have taken only one day to travel from New York to me in Illinois. Instead it took almost a month. 

I finally called the postal service’s help center and found out that it was in a warehouse where is went after Memphis. Why it went to Memphis after Indiana, I have no idea. The woman I spoke with did her due diligence and found the package but said, “I have to be honest. I don’t think you’re going to receive it. There’s a spelling discrepancy in the address.”



Evidently the scanners of the Postal Service  that are supposed to make things go faster and more smoothly can’t do what humans can do. The machines can’t tell that BVLD should have been BLVD. 


I’m glad that somebody at the undisclosed warehouse location figured that out and made a handwritten label. I don’t think it was the person who got Grandma Josie’s card to the right address, but that’s the kind of human work that machines and artificial intelligence will never be able to.