Father of Six

The United States Postal Service (USPS) employs roughly 700,000 people who work to ensure that 213 billion pieces of mail are delivered to 146 million addresses each year.

So just how in the hell did this letter get delivered to my house?

As you can see when viewing the full image, Vivian Taylor of Columbus, Ohio addressed a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Deforge of Coniston, Ontario, Canada.

Lets see if we can track the letter and the number of people who handled it, each of whom made some form of mistake to allow this letter intended for delivery in Canada to eventually wind up being delivered to my home in suburban Denver, Colorado, USA.

Vivian then, we can only assume, placed the letter in her mailbox expecting a postal carrier (1) to come by and collect the letter from the box along with the rest of the mail, and take it to the post office. There, all of the mail is placed (2) on a truck and taken (3) to a mail processing plant.

At the mail processing plant, machines (4 - but not a person!?! a person must load the machine) separate mail by shape and size. They also orient the packages so their addresses are right-side up and facing the same direction. Your letter gets its postmark, and machines print cancellation lines across postage stamps to prevent them from being reused.

Lets check the letter again to see the post mark and cancellation lines across the postage lines.

Yep, the stamps are canceled.

Take a look at the top center of this image and you can see that the postmark is clearly made at Columbus, OH.

Now here is where the technology of the machine makes the first easily identifiable error. It works like this - an optical scanner scans the address, and then a bar code representing the specific address is sprayed on the front of the envelope. If the scanner can’t read the address, the letter is manually sorted.

Look closely at the image above and you can see the bar code and the digit sequence “80121-2309″ preceding the bar code. I have no idea what the bar code represents, but the numbers are my USA zip code. How did the machine scan the Ontario address and interpret it as my Colorado one? I like the statement about if the machine can’t read the address that it is manually sorted.

From there the letter then goes on to other machines. While still at the mail processing plant other processing machines (5, machine again) read the bar codes and direct the letters into bins based on ZIP codes — this indicates the next processing plant in the region where the letter will ultimately be delivered.

From the bins, the letters are sorted into trays by ZIP code (6) and flown or trucked (7) to the next processing. Revisiting the image of our letter again,

in the lower left you’ll see someone has written “Par Avion” and “Air Mail.” I don’t think it was our Vivian - compare the handwriting between these words and the delivery address. Perhaps this was a (8th) person to handle our letter? This is also our first indication that the letter has maybe made it into Canada, otherwise why the French “Par Avion”? Or maybe someone in the USPS system actually read the address, and knowing a journey to Canada required adherence to some nutty rule about the dual official languages and wrote the Air Mail version in French?

At the final processing plant (9,) sorting machines read the bar codes and sort the letters by carrier (10) and into delivery order for that carrier (11.)

The letters are taken to the individual post offices (12), and the carriers load the trays into their individual vehicles for final delivery (13.)

(All the information about how mail gets processed was extracted from this website - http://people.howstuffworks.com/usps5.htm)

By my unofficial guess, that’s 13 different people who had the opportunity to catch the mistaken digital zip code and bar code. Evidently, NONE of the 13 felt obligated.

The final question and issue I have is this. How can my postman, in good conscious, not recognize any portion of the faulty address? Certainly this last line of defense would have recognized that the only similarity between the actual delivery address on the letter and my physical address - out of a total of three lines of critical information - was the “41.”

It is just so incredible to me that this letter made it to my mailbox.

So what are we doing with the letter? We’ve placed it inside another envelope, along with a note explaining how it was delivered to us and we’ll be taking it to the post office tomorrow for re-delivery. Hopefully that package won’t be delivered to my house next week.