Ever hear of the USPS's "Scribble Specialists"? Their job is to decipher illegible handwriting computers can't identify.
Quote:
Computers have...learned to see words in scrawls and squiggles the way voice-recognition software hears them in hemming and hawing. The Postal Service says their reading score today is 95%...What's left over is the handwriting from hell. It pours into just two remaining RECs—here and in Wichita, Kan. Their 1,900 clerks cope with machine-unreadable mail from the whole country. Last year, that included 714,085,866 chicken-scratch first-class letters.
If my math is right, based on the above quote, each of these postal workers read about 181 pieces of mail every hour, every day of the year. (Assuming: 8 hours per workday x 5 days per week x 52 weeks per year = 2080 hours/year x 1900 clerks = 3,952,000 hours of work. So, 714,085,866 pieces of mail read each year / 3,952,000 hours = ~181 pieces of mail read by each clerk each hour.)
I found this news article a rather interesting read, so I thought I'd share the link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...bs%3Darticle
Posted 11/03/2011 12:26 pm
