Hokay, I’m awake now.
Now, I’m not particularly out to defend my employer, nor to put the boot into them. I’ll tell you what I know as both an old fashioned manual sorter and also as a sorting machine operator.
When I am sorting letters by hand, I am expected to sort 1500 articles per hour, with a 99% accuracy, based on several thousand memorised placenames. I can usually more or less achieve this. When I am running a latest generation Lockheed Martin MLOCR (Multi-Line Optical Character Recognition) unit, I can usually crank the old girl up to sort at about 37 000 articles per hour. The error rate is not as good as it is for manual sorting, but it’s still surprisingly accurate. The slight increase in mis-sorted articles when going through a machine is a trade off for the sheer volume those babies can sort. In the old days, if your mail was delayed it was possibly because it had been manually mis-sorted, but more likely because, although it was still in the correct mail stream, it was sitting in a backlog somewhere. These days, it is less likely to be left behind for the next day, and more likely to have been sent to the wrong place. That said, Australia Post’s reliability is currently at an all-time high of about 94 - 98% of articles arriving at their correct destination on time. This compares well with the bad old days of the 1970s and 80s. Of course, this is little consolation if you are one of the 5% whose letter is late. In the postal system’s defence though, there is also a psychological element at play here - people don’t notice the letters that arrive on time.
To explain the errors, and how they happen, I’ll start with manual sorting. 1500 letters per hour might not sound like much, but when you include “travelling time” (modern sorting frames are wrap-around, and we have to swivel our chair left and right), time away from the frame to collect mail, and time to “clear down” full apertures and remove the mail, it starts to be moderately difficult to achieve the required sorting rate. It’s a steady thud thud thud of letters being sorted. Add in to the mix that approximately 5 to 10% of private mail is incompletely or incorrrectly addressed… ahem
(please do put VIC on it - do you know how many suburb names Melbourne and Sydney share? Or that there are SEVEN Mount Pleasants in Australia? Or that Victoria sometimes uses non-3000 series postcodes? Or that human sorters don’t use postcodes much?)
…some of it is illegible, and much computer generated stuff (bills etc) is not much better, and it starts getting tricky. Further add that it’s not exactly a stimulating job, and it’s easy to wander off on a train of thought, and what might seem like a very silly mistake to an outsider is actually quite plausible.
My sorting centre has a 74-way break on its sorting frames. Four of these are for overseas: New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, Overseas (for everywhere else - it’ll be resorted at the International Mail Facility - we just do the three biggest countries for them to save time). The other seventy apertures are for Australian destinations. Now let’s say I pick up a bundle of mail and start sorting. Suddenly I get a “run” of mail to the United States. The sender hasn’t actually written United States on the letters (this is very common - they expect us to know, and usually we do). So as I flick through, I’m looking at the last line, and they are all two-letter US state abbreviations: CA, WA, WA, FL, IL, NC, WA. What? WA? I’d been sorting US mail, but the letters reverted to Australian mail, and that last WA was Western Australia, not Washington. At speed, this is easy to do. We only read the last line of the address (others are for the postman), and we don’t even read the last line fully if we are going fast - a common address like PARRAMATTA NSW 2150 will register in our minds just as the familiar shape of those characters. We don’t actually read it.
I have seen a letter going from Florida to Sidney Ohio. Sidney isn’t even the same spelling, yet that didn’t stop it from getting covered in NOT SYDNEY NOVA SCOTIA and NOT SYDNEY NEW SOUTH WALES stamps. It was a well-travelled letter, that one.
Sometimes letters stick together. When I pick one up, a smaller one is hidden underneath. As I sort the top one, the sudden movement breaks the bottom one free, and it floats unseen into the aperture below. It could end up anywhere. This again, is relatively common. A letter bound for New Zealand could find itself languishing at London’s Mt Pleasant (yes, another one) Sorting Centre this way, adding days or weeks to its journey. A letter going to London will end up at LAX.
Or I’ll be sorting away, and the guy next door says, “Hey TLD, where does Gooloogong go to, mate?”
“It goes via Bathurst.”
As I reply, I have a letter in my hand for HOBART TAS 7000. In that split second, Bathurst is in my head, and it goes to country NSW instead of Tasmania. This absentmindedness is not uncommon.
In short, the 99% accuracy rate is more or less adhered to. The mistakes which do happen have a variety of causes. I am not defending them - they shouldn’t happen - but often they are not as hard to believe as first thought.
The automated sorting machines are a similar story. The current Lockheed Martin models are third generation machines. The first, in the 1970s, were of French design, and required an operator to manually key in postcodes. The second appeared in about 1990, and were manufactured by AEG. They were the first OCR units, and are still in use. Their accuracy is quite good, but they are slow. the latest ones have pushed the speed right up without losing much accuracy. That said, OCR is still an embryonic technology in a way. The machine will make some mistakes. There is no way around it.
The fifteen year-old AEG units were supposedly able to read the entire address, but mostly relied on the last line. The new Lockheed Martin ones read the whole thing and compare the values of the different lines. For example, if it received 200 Pitt Street Brisbane NSW 2000, it would reconcile all the attributes of the address as being Sydney not Brisbane, and would either sort it to Sydney, or reject it to manual sorting.
Sometimes it gets this wrong. Sometimes, it simply fucks up. Getting a computer to sort handwritten addresses is not easy. There are mistakes that cannot be explained.
In the case of your parcel Cunctator, there are large machines which are the parcel equivalent of the MLOCRs (I work in mails, not parcels, so that is why this post is letter-oriented, but the principles are the same). These machines are capable of stuff-ups too.
In short, the network is quite robust. The amount of mail that gets moved per day (1 million articles at Christmas time per day in my facility alone) would have been unheard of in the old days. Most of it gets there on time.
The fuck ups that do happen are probably 50/50 the customers’ and Australia Post’s fault. Here is what you can do to minimise the chances of this happening to your mail.
1. Address your mail properly
This is increasingly important these days, due to the high level of automation.
John Smith
23 Bellbird St
GOSFORD NSW 2250
Left-aligned, no commas or other punctuation, bottom line in caps. If writing to a foreign address, the country name should be in English. The rest of the address should be in the language of destination.
2. Use standard envelopes
Australians should use DL-sized “post office preferred” envelopes in either white or a very pale pastel colour. If there are those “postcode squares” on it, only use these for handwritten addresses. Ignore them if the address is printed. Ignore them if the address is foreign (some countries have a similar four-digit postcode - South Africa is one).
3. No enclosures other than paper
If you are mailing a letter, don’t put items such as pens etc in it. It will stand a good chance of being torn to shreds by the machines. Send a proper parcel instead. Remember those Paddle Pop promotions where you send in the sticks? There is a good reason why you don’t see them anymore.
4. Keep your address in the "Address Zone"
The address should be roughly in the middle of the letter, with generous white space below it (at least a couple of cm) and also white space on the reverse side at the bottom. These areas are used for barcoding, and dark colours on them such as alphabetical characters, pictures of Garfield, or “I heart you” stickers etc can flip out the OCR. It is preferable to include your return address on the front top left corner than on the back. Flipping envelopes slows manual sorting.
5. Don’t Use Registered Mail
It doesn’t provide the same level of security as it used to, and is a waste of money. It is sorted with the regular mail, and is only treated differently at the post offices at either end.
6. Do use Express Post
Although Express Post is a speed service, not a security one, I maintain it offers the best risk and value for money in sending valuables. Express Post is sorted manually all the time. The satchels are not much dearer than ordinary parcels, but they are treated like royalty. And it is fast, with overnight delivery between most Australian capital cities.
7. Use of pillar boxes (street posting boxes)
They close at 6pm sharp. After that, there is no guarantee. Don’t confuse the yellow Express Post and Red normal ones. This will delay your mail.
A note on valuables:
Try not to send cash, jewellery etc through the postal system. Mail theft is quite rare, but I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen the squads of black-suited goons seemingly arrive from nowhere and haul the offender away. It is highly uncommon though. Nonetheless, use your common sense. Express Post satchels are good for valuable things because they are so anonymous. They all look the same. If you ar ereally paranoid, bear in mind that the postman is the weak link - the mail sorters are under constant video surveillance, but the postie is not, so send your mail to “co Post Office, Suburb”, and tell the recipient to pick it up there.