And here I was, using a typewriter to type addresses on envelopes or labels for maximum legibility and going to the trouble to look up the ZIP+4 code, because I wanted my letters to get there as quickly and as painlessly as possible. That turns out to be even more overkill than I thought: the USPS has a system for reading badly addressed mail: a single Remote Encoding Facility in Salt Lake City, Utah. There used to be 55 such facilities, but it’s been cut down to just one thanks to dramatically improved OCR. Tom Scott visits the facility in this video; Atlas Obscura had a short writeup in 2015.
