Thursday, November 3, 2011

Bad handwriting and job security

A look at life at the U.S. Postal Service’s Remote Encoding Center, “a room where hundreds of clerks sit in silence, day and night, staring at America's worst-addressed envelopes”:

Poor Penmanship Spells Job Security for Post Office's Scribble Specialists (Wall Street Journal)

[I’m reminded of The Pale King: David Foster Wallace might have made a great novel about boredom, attention, and these postal workers.]

comments: 2

Pete said...

Wow. An alternate career that I'm actually qualified for. I used to process payments at a company that sold magazine subscriptions, part of which involved trying to decipher which customer the payment actually came from, based on gnarled handwriting. Though of course this only makes me qualified to work for a dinosaur that might not be around much longer anyway.

Michael Leddy said...

Reading handwritten college work is good training too. :)